Christians have been waiting for the ‘Second Coming’ of “Jesus”, ‘The Christ’, the “Messiah”, for about two thousand years now. By the way we are handling our planet, before this Messiah returns, intelligent higher life on the planet would have been destroyed, or, made irreversibly sorrier. So, maybe, in the face of such perilous circumstances, His Royal Highness Prince Charles (heir to the throne of the United Kingdom) is aggressively peddling a ‘New Messiah’ to ‘Earth-ians’ – a frog.
There is a global financial crisis, a ‘meltdown’? Call in Messiah Frog! There is 10% average unemployment in the developed countries? Invoke the name of the Messiah Frog!!? There is 90% unemployment rate in Sierra Leone among employable youth? Shout for the Messiah F…. (Ummpph!! Wait!! That could be too daunting a problem for even Messiah Frog, don’t you think?).
Almost every day on CNN, I see Prince Charles proselytizing for the ‘New Messiah’.
The image of Prince Charles and the Messiah Frog appear to be fused; and Prince Charles - unlike Messiah Jesus who called into spiritual action lowly fishermen as his disciples - has roped into his Messianic inner circle the world-famous dissident, Tibetan (Chinese?) Buddhist monk, the Dalai Lama; Western household-name actors Harrison Ford and Daniel Craig; comedian William Craig, Brazilian soccer legend, Pele, and the two devastatingly handsome and Mike Tyson-built sons of the late Princess Diana (O, yes, of course, sons of Prince Charles as well), Prince William and Prince Harry.
Hear H.R.H. Prince Charles pontificating: "Rainforests help keep our climate cool and absorb nearly a sixth of our CO2 [carbon dioxide] emissions. Yet they are being destroyed at the rate of a football pitch every four seconds. This destruction releases hundreds of years of stored carbon into the atmosphere, and is a key contributor to climate change” - more than all the vehicles in the world, the dour-faced uninspiring Prince Charles, sitting in plush palatial un-frog-like ambience, warned ‘Earth-ians’. And the Frog Prince Charles warns: "Unless we protect the rainforests, we will most certainly lose the battle against catastrophic climate change….”
My gut reaction to all this frog Messianic hype of Prince Charles is to hiss with utter contempt. For one, the edible frog – a delicacy for many cultures, including European – is not as cuddly and loveable as the World Wide Fund for Nature’s (WWF) logo animal, the Panda bear. The frog is slimy. No fault of the frog really. The frog’s skin secretes a mucus that helps keep it moist. Even with its slimy skin, frogs need to stay near water. In tropical countries like Sierra Leone , frogs are found mainly in murky waters, where you would shriek in horror if you see you infant wading into. Frogs are members of the zoological class called Amphibia. Amphibians are cold-blooded (or poikilothermic) vertebrate animals. They differ from reptiles in that they lack scales and generally return to water to breed. (O my!: frogs and snakes: two animals that human nightmares are often made out of!!). Frogs have very special skin! Frogs don't just wear their skin: they drink and breathe through their skins. Frogs don't usually swallow water like we do. Instead they absorb most of the moisture they need through their skin. When you read the other ‘nasty’ traits of frogs, you would wonder why Prince Charles is promoting them as a ‘New Messiah’ to save mankind.
Frogs shed their skin regularly to keep themselves healthy. Some frogs shed their skin weekly, others as often as every day! This is what they do when they are shedding their skins: they start to twist and turn and act like they have the hiccups. They do this to stretch themselves out of their old skin! Finally, the frog would pull its skin off over it's head, like a sweater, and then – don’t vomit now!! – the frog would eat its own skin!! (Parallel there: a human being eating his faces, or a man who cuts his finger nails and chomps them!)
Of course, those who live close to swamps learn to dread frogs. They cause such a racket at night! Why? Actually, what humans would call ‘noise’ are really frogs ‘singing’ - often it is ‘love songs’. O!!! ? How can one think of ‘love songs’ with such repulsive creatures such as frogs? All that din you hear from frogs is elicited when the male frogs wants to attract females – the same way some human males do with their garish necklace, flashing dollar bills at restaurants, or cruising around in a Hummer jeep and lowering their car windows close to the female prey. Bemused? Before you dismiss Prince Charles gospel for his new Messiah as so much regal glitz, learn a bit more about the intrinsic Messianic qualities of this ugly species, the frog.
For hundreds of years, people living in rainforests – like in Sierra Leone, Liberia, Brazil, Congo - have known about the ‘magic’ of certain frogs. These frogs have powerful chemicals in their skins. The chemicals ooze out of the skin whenever the frogs are attacked. Since the chemicals are poisonous or taste bad, most attackers learn to stay' away from the frogs. The rainforest people have been using these chemicals as medicine or as poison to kill other animals for food. And now scientists are learning to use the chemicals too. Here are some of the things they're finding out about the chemicals:
Australian tree frogs give off a chemical that helps heal sores when it's put on human skin. A chemical from a frog that lives in Ecuador , South America , can be used as a painkiller. The chemical is 200 times more powerful than a painkiller often given to people in hospitals. People from an Indian tribe in Peru , South America , rub frog chemicals into their skin before they go hunting. The liquid makes them feel stronger and more alert. Feeling like that makes them better hunters, so they call the liquid ‘hunting magic’. (Could this be some of the secrets of the ‘Kamajors’ hunters in Sierra Leone ?). So, now, we see some of the logic in Prince Charles using the frog as a ‘savior’ for mankind.
In comments published on his official Web site, Frog Prince Charles underline the magnitude of the problem the world must confront: "We take our eye off the 'climate crunch' at our peril. While we hope and pray that the underlying strengths of the global economy will - once again - enable it to bounce back, the effects of climate change will be far from temporary and will, indeed, be irreversible…The biggest challenge our planet has ever seen - literally a battle for survival.".
Aha!! That latter part of the Frog Prince Charles’ pontification – “literally a battle for survival” – gets by blood boiling, paradoxically, positively and negatively!!! I am positively aroused because if the Frog Prince Charles can excite excitement in the rest of narrow-minded and myopic humanity, there will be Hope. I am negatively inflamed because Prince Charles is being such a bloody hypocrite! Prince Charles is ensconced on the very throne that has presided over the Global Mess of Environmental Degradation – and he ain’t showing any penitence yet.
It is the Frog Prince Charles whose United Kingdom colonized nearly half of the globe – from Australia to India to almost all of Africa to Canada to Bermuda, Jamaica and Falkland Island…. in rapacious and triumphantly relentless gusto. Prince Charles’ Kingdom played the key role in the enslavement of Africans for over three hundred years. It is Prince Charles’ Kingdom that has perpetuated the Atlantic Slave Trade in a benign form – which masqueraded as European colonialism; that has morphed into Breton Woods institutions like IMF, World Bank, etc., with their imperative of “Globalization”. Why are the tropical rainforests facing accelerated loss today? Global injustice!! Global inequity in trade!! Global ‘slavery’!!
Look, I have been a ‘Green’ for over two decades. In Liberia in 1989, I was the co-founder and Editor for the magazine “GREENLOVE”. Prince Charles’ father, H.R.H. Prince Phillip, was (still is?) the President of the largest, most prestigious, green organization in the world, the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF)-International. The WWF was one of the green organizations that sponsored GREENLOVE magazine in 1989. In GREENLOVE, I argued for ‘Green Love Logic’ to save our planet. I postulated for a ‘Marshall Plan’ for tropical rainforest countries; a redesign of global systems. Twenty years ago while greens like us were screaming for green sanity, the likes of Prince Charles were deaf, afflicted by green insanity, apparently. Today, there is now increasing scientific evidence of the lunacy of “global finance…global industrial growth….” – ‘growth’ upon the near-death bed of the planet. Ha!!! This piece is not meant to insult the Frog Prince Charles, or, even grate his royal sensibilities. It is also directed at the ‘enslaved minds’ of the African elite.
Have the African elites who religiously read magazines like NEWSWEEK miss these words of British Prime Minster Gordon Brown: “…Climate Change presents stark injustice: it has been largely caused by the emissions of the richest countries, yet its severest effects are being felt by the poorest. The Copenhagen deal must therefore help the most vulnerable countries adapt to the changes that are now inevitable…” (NEWSWEEK, September 28, 2009, “We Must Act Now”, by Gordon Brown, Page 24). Brown, the son of a British Methodist clergy sounds almost Christian there; or, maybe, it is the usual patronizing British when talking about, or down to, Africa …Do we need to be ‘helped’? Why can’t we help ourselves? Fight! Demand!! Save ourselves!!! And save the richest nations of the Frog Prince Charles from their own greed!!!! And save planet earth. And save the Frog Messiah too. Messiahs, as the precedence of Messiah Jesus two thousand years ago teaches us, are not always good at saving themselves.
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