“The Coming of the Toads” is the title of a short poem by E. L. Mayo:
“‘The very rich are not like you and me,’
Sad Fitzgerald said, who could not guess
The coming of the vast and gleaming toads
With precious heads which, at a button’s press,
The flick of a switch, hop only to convey
To you and me and even the very rich
The perfect jewel of equality.”E. L. Mayo. Summer Unbound and Other Poems, the University of Minnesota Press, 1958 (58-7929). Also, E. L. Mayo, Collected Poems. New Letters, University of Missouri – Kansas City. Volume 47, Nos. 2 & 3, Winter-Spring, 1980-81.
The young toads were ugly televisions, but those eerily glowing tubes contained a lovely irony. The toads invaded indiscriminately. The bluish-green light emitted from the eyes of the toads emerged from every class of home, all experiencing the same medium for their evening massage. Mayo’s poem is a figurative evaluation of the effects of media on class and culture.
In Fitzgerald’s short story “The Rich Boy” (1926), the narrator says, “Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me.” But Mayo doesn’t seem to be quoting from Fitzgerald’s story. He seems to be referencing the famous, rumored exchange by the two rich-obsessed, repartee aficionados Hemingway and Fitzgerald. Hemingway wrote, in his short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936):
“He remembered poor Julian and his romantic awe of them and how he had started a story once that began, ‘The very rich are different from you and me.’ And how some one had said to Julian, Yes, they have more money. But that was not humorous to Julian. He thought they were a special glamourous race and when he found they weren’t it wrecked him just as much as any other thing that wrecked him.”
Did TV have a democratizing effect, or are its effects numbing? In Act 2, Scene 1, of Shakespeare’s “As You Like It,” Duke Senior, just sent to the woods without TV, mentions the toad’s jewel:
“Now, my co-mates and brothers in exile, hath not old custom made this life more sweet than that of painted pomp? Are not these woods more free from peril than the envious court? Here feel we but the penalty of Adam, the seasons’ difference, as the icy fang and churlish chiding of the winter’s wind, which, when it bites and blows upon my body, even till I shrink with cold, I smile and say ‘This is no flattery: these are counselors that feelingly persuade me what I am.’ Sweet are the uses of adversity, which, like the toad, ugly and venomous, wears yet a precious jewel in his head; and this our life exempt from public haunt finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones and good in every thing. I would not change it.”
Fitzgerald didn’t embrace television, but today he might cradle a metamorph tadpole in his lap – or he would grab for the toad in his pocket. What would it convey? The toad’s jewel is more than a metaphor; the outlandish shows of television are today the Duke’s counselors. We enter the space of the light box, and the toad’s jewel poisons us to the paradox of staying put, to electronic exile, but does it contain its own antidote, a magical modern toadstone?
In Mayo’s light poem, viewers watch television in an egalitarian living room, where an ugly toad’s glowing jewel is an involving force. But a few years later, McLuhan complicates the picture by illustrating the Toad’s jewel numbs as it equalizes. What seemed at first a marvel — access, sameness, shared vision — becomes something harder to name as the light flickers and splinters. The toad is no longer confined to the corner of the room. It blinks from pockets, desks, palms, and laps. And it would make little difference to McLuhan whether we’re watching a show on television or a reel on our cellphone, whether we think we’ve outwitted the algorithms by going back to a TV guide, or purified our phone by removing all its apps. “The medium is the message,” McLuhan said. And now the toads are everywhere – “Here Comes Everybody,” or Everytoad, Joyce’s streaming “riverrun” full of toads blinking from every hand.
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The Coming of the Toads at WordPress is written by Joe Linker.
I attended El Camino and Dominguez Hills and earned a BA in English, with a minor in 20th Century Thought and Expression, and an MA in English, while putting in six years in the Army California National Guard (Wheeled and Track Vehicle Mechanic, 140th Engineers, Manhattan Beach). Two decades of adjunct work bookend 25 years in what Han-shan called the “red dust” of business (CPCU, 1992). I was a Hawthorne Fellow at the Attic Institute of Arts and Letters, in the summer of 2012, where I worked on “Penina’s Letters.”
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The Coming of the Toads 