The toad beneath the harrow

“The toad beneath the harrow knows/exactly where each tooth-point goes/the butterfly upon the road/preaches contentment to that toad”- Rudyard Kipling

Happy Days are here again, the butterflies tell, as they dance above our heads and live large. The recession’s over, or at worst in a “jobless recovery,” and it’s high time for the rubes to get off the sidelines and join the high-rolling investors. The Dow is at 12,000, and on Wall Street benefits and compensation at publicly traded securities and banks are at a record $135 billion. New car sales for Ford and GM are booming.

For some reason, I am not in a particularly celebratory mood, and morose even for a pathologist. Maybe it’s the horrific and endless winter, nice here in Durham today for a change, but the tales one hears from friends in the frozen Midwest and family in northern New England make one glad to live around here and not have to deal with the apocalyptic amount of snow, ice and frozen misery currently afflicting a vast swath of the country. Maybe it’s because Green Bay and Pittsburgh are vying in the Super Bowl, the biggest bread-and-circus spectacle in the vanguard of our popular culture, instead of two teams I could give a hoot about. And I stand to get fleeced in the departmental Super Bowl pool, by the way. Again.

Maybe it’s because this week I had to explain to someone I know the nuances of a new and completely unexpected diagnosis of malignancy, knowing that this individual would soon face a tough road and some serious decision-making. Ordinarily, such discussions just come with the territory as a pathologist, what with the intimate knowledge of the body in disease states that we keep on hand, but the familiar and quotidian bad actors become unsettling when they pay visits close to home. Yes, this week there are many toads beneath the tines of the harrow, and damn the butterflies anyway.

And things have hit the fan and gotten extremely ugly in Egypt, a heretofore more or less stable and secular island in a sea of instability. If you were around in 1979 to witness the revolution in Iran, the overthrow of the hated and U.S.-backed Shah and the ascendancy of at least an equally repressive Islamic theocracy, you’d find the current situation in Cairo highly disturbing. Although there are significant differences in the countries, the local religious climates, the times and the principals, the resemblance and parallels in the Egyptian capital to the historic events in Iran are striking. Once again, the U.S. has found itself propping up an unpopular and repressive regime, as a secular dictator in our estimation is preferable to yet another radical Islamic state. Should the Mubarak government begin to fall precipitously, unlike the reunification of Germany with the dismantling of the Berlin Wall, or the collapse of the communist rule in Poland following the Solidarity demonstrations in the Lenin Shipyards, there’s no evil Soviet empire to rally the crowds against. There’s only the Great Satan in this case, and the considerable financial aid from America helps supply the tanks, tear gas and rubber bullets the Mubarak government turns on its own people. There will be hell to pay.

Despite the cessation of open hostility following the four wars fought between the two countries in the first 25 years of Israel’s existence and the cold peace following the assassination of Anwar Sadat, anti-Israel and anti-Jewish sentiments run high in Egypt. I don’t think anyone really knows what a post-Mubarak Egypt will look like, or around what force the secular and Islamic opposition will coalesce, or whether the instability in Egypt will spread to other dictatorial and secular states that dot the Middle East. But we’ll have a good idea when and if the crowd in Cairo’s anger becomes focused upon this country with the familiar refrain of Death to Israel, Death to the Zionists, Death to the U.S.A.

The contentment preached by the butterflies isn’t completely hollow. As I close this column out, our Blue Devils have chopped up and finished off the Terps in College Park. I enjoyed watching the louts in attendance make for the exits in the Comcast Center, and there was no repeat of last year’s execrable display up there. And finally, large burrowing rodents emerging from dens at various spots around this fair land failed to see their respective shadows. Spring is on the way—if you believe in this type of portent—and life in the waning minutes of the day is good.

Dr. Thomas Sporn is an associate professor in the Department of Pathology. His column runs every other Friday.