If you are privileged enough not to know anyone whose SNAP benefits were cut or has been working for weeks unpaid or suffering any indignities caused by the Republican lead government shutdown, then I guess you should call yourself lucky. You clearly live in a different America than I do. Oddly enough, the Brothers Grimm fairytale, The Fisherman and his Wife was echoing around in my mind this week. According to Wikipedia, this tale of greed was collected by the brothers in 1812, and is considered an anti-fairytale due to its tragic ending. Like most Waldorf school moms, I read this story to my young children, but due to decades teaching Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse the haunting images of the angry sea in the fairytale have stayed with me as Woolf wove the two stories together. It is the Greed with a capital G of the White House that is stirring this cautionary fairytale back into my consciousness.

Woolf’s central character in To the Lighthouse, Mrs. Ramsey, reads the Grimm tale to her youngest, James, to distract him with story as they spend an afternoon by the window. In the tale the fisherman catches a magical fish; once released it can grant a wish. But the wife’s desires steadily become insatiable. She demands her husband plead for her, “Flounder, flounder, in the sea, Come, I pray thee, here to me: For my wife, good Ilsabil, Wills not as I’d have her will” asking for more and more and more wealth and power until, well as I said, the tale ends in tragedy.

Woolf turns the stereotypical script around by having the husband, Mr. Ramsey, be the needy one, like the fisherman’s wife his unquenchable demand for attention runs through the whole of the novel. The sea imagery from the fairy-tale that Mrs. Ramsey reads to her son moves from calm to a hell-broth as the fisherman’s wife’s demands increase. “Outside a great storm was raging and blowing so hard that he could hardly keep his feet; houses and trees toppled over, the mountains trembled, rocks rolled into the sea, the sky was pitch black, and it thundered and lightened, and the sea came in with black waves as high as church towers and mountains, and all with white foam at the top.” Rage does seem to be the right response to unchecked greed, and as the Brothers Grimm told the tale, the fury of the sea mirrored such emotion. How can one read the headlines these last weeks and not feel similarly? As gold leaf is applied to every gaudy flourish in the once dignified Oval Office, 42 million Americans were denied their promised aid to buy food. According to the non-partisan group, Common Cause, “Trump’s budget bill takes money away from regular Americans and spends it on ICE raids and tax cuts for the rich.” Facts weigh little in this administration but if you stray from cable news they are easy to find, and all point to the truth. What is in the shadows behind the intentions of the GOP? The release of Epstein emails provides some answers, but first and foremost this administration is padding their own pockets: $1.8 billion to date.

This current administration is focused on aiding themselves first and then the billionaire class while curtailing every benefit for those who need our assistance the most: our children and our elders. In the fairytale, the wife’s overreaching greed is what ultimately brings about her undoing. “The wife tossed and turned from side to side the whole night through, thinking all the while what she could be next, but nothing would occur to her; and when she saw the red dawn she slipped off the bed, and sat before the window to see the sun rise, and as it came up she said, “Ah, I have it! what if I should make the sun and moon to rise-husband!”she cried, and stuck her elbow in his ribs, “wake up, and go to your fish, and tell him I want power over the sun and moon.” This last wish for God-like power is her toppling. Isn’t this the warning of the tale, that unchecked greed will destroy us, as the whole of nature swells in revolt and casts us back to our simpler origins? But what about those deciding our country’s fate, who are garnering massive wealth from those who labor beneath them? Will those accumulating such overreaching power be forced to stare into the dreadful storm of their own making?

I do not see a reckoning on the horizon, but if there is still truth and justice in this world, it must, right? There is no doubt that suffering is plentiful both here and abroad with little recourse from those who have the power to alleviate it. The current administration is busy dismantling law and order, driving up prices while halting our most needy citizens from accessing relief, as the man at the helm is roiling the very existence of our Republic by tearing down anyone who questions his lies. I don’t know why, maybe because I had a grandmother who told me stories or a mother who lead with a vivid imagination, but I believe in the power of story, in the clear right and wrong which exists in fairytales. I would suggest the current president heed these lessons, especially as he is confronted by an America who does not wish for an Emperor, especially a naked and greedy one.