GNAT: Good morning, your portly Worship!
MAYOR (swatting ineffectually at the gnat): Go away,
pesky no-bug!”
GNAT: I think
not, your Sweatiness. I enjoy
hovering in the moist jungle air you generate!
MAYOR: Who do
you represent, you black fly of Beelzebub?
GNAT (contemptuously): Gnat, your Worship, not Fly.
MAYOR: Okay, bloody GNAT then!
GNAT: I
represent all the people, your Lardship, and I have come to feast lavishly upon
your Bulkiness, you scrumptious Peking Duck of a politician!
And having clearly announced
its intentions, the Gnat buzzes the Mayor mercilessly—stinging him twenty, forty,
a hundred times until he is as red as a pomegranate. The Mayor roars his protests. His outraged cries shake the whole building. So frantic is he, he begins to scratch
and claw at himself, finally collapsing onto the office broadloom, almost insensible
from exhaustion and pain.
GNAT: Well, I
can see my work here is done!
As the gnat leaves the
Mayor’s office, eager to spread the word to his fellow gnats of his David and
Goliath triumph, he flies right into a huge spiderweb blocking the entrance to
the council chamber, where he is summarily eaten by an eight-legged alderman.
(curtain)
What can we learn from this? Well, La Fontaine says the fable teaches
us not to judge an opponent from his size. He also attaches a second moral—“you may pass through great
danger safely but be killed by a little thing” (though I think a spidery
alderman is no little thing!). To
this I would add a third moral—or at least a cautionary note: if you’re the
Mayor, get the city to buy you a better security system—one with the optional
anti-gnat features.
