Jumpin’ Calaveras, African Frogs

Hard as it may be to believe, frogs, those amiable amphibians, are at the heart of a controversy that, if unresolved, may forever tarnish the reputation of one of the Golden State’s unique traditional institutions--Calaveras County’s celebrated jumping frog contest.

Now, there undoubtedly are people who will snigger that only California could have a “tradition” based on a fictional account of a crooked gambling scam concocted by a guy from Missouri. To them we can only say, that’s why we have the movie industry and you don’t.

By now, you’ve begun to suspect the uncomfortable truth: Yes, we are about to discuss the African Goliath frog. You’ve seen them--huge, green, confident, starring fixedly from the pages of this newspaper, each one serene in what the German philosopher Martin Heidegger would have called their essential frogness. But he was a Nazi, so who cares what he would have said anyway.

The point is that the organizers of the Calaveras contest want to ban the Goliath frogs. They say they’re too big. They say they leap too far. They say they’ll jump right off the stage and smack the spectators. Let’s be honest: What they’re really saying is that these frogs are foreign.

This is squalid nativism. Constitutionally speaking, the Goliath frogs are in this country legally, and they’re entitled to the same rights enjoyed by American frogs. But recourse to the rule of law isn’t enough here. Don’t all these whispers about the unfairness of having to vie with African amphibians mask a secret anxiety about the adequacy of our own frogs?

Sounds like a job for the Commission on Self-Esteem.