By Paul Angel

 Robert Southey (1774–1843) was an English author and poet. His biographies included ones on El Cid, Lord Nelson and Robespierre. His vast poetry collection contained  Madoc, The Curse of Kehama and Roderick: The Last of the Goths. Southey was also a scholar, writing books on Brazil  and the Peninsular War.

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His most famous work was none of these, but instead a lengthy poem published in 1837 in a collection called The Doctor. The original piece was titled “The Story of the Three Bears.” After decades of editing, we now know it in its modern incarnation as “Goldilocks and the Three Bears.”

In the updated version of the tale (1849), a young girl wanders into a cabin inhabited by a family of bears—Papa Bear, Mama Bear and Baby Bear. Fortuitously for the little girl, the small “sloth” of Ursus arctos living there was out for a short stroll while their piping-hot porridge cooled.

In addition, not living in an area of the woods run by soft-on-crime politicians, the Three Bears left their door unlocked, fortuitous for Goldilocks.

Once inside, as you well know, the pushy little girl helped herself to the Three Bears’ breakfast, testing all the bowls of porridge, looking for one that was “just right.” Goldilocks, you see, liked everything “just right.”

Not wanting to be uncomfortable while she stole the Bear’s food, the tenacious trespasser tested the chairs for one that was “just right,” bursting straight through the caning of the smallest, destroying it.

The juvenile delinquent then barged into the Bear family’s bedrooms and, with unmeasured chutzpah, started testing out the mattresses.

Papa Bear’s Sealy Tempur-Pedic was too hard. Mama’s Simmons Beautyrest was too soft. But Baby Bear’s Stearns & Foster was “just right.” One hopes Goldilocks took off her shoes for, as the story tells us, “she was not at all a well-brought-up little girl.”

When the Bear family returned home, they realized someone had been in the house. The author tells us: “The Three Bears thought they had better make further search in case it was a burglar, so they went upstairs into their bedchamber.”

Papa Bear, with AR-15  in hand, and nervous Mama and Baby Bear following closely behind, opened the door to the cub’s bedroom. There was the blond squatter, fast asleep. She woke up quickly, however, when Papa Bear let out a massive roar.  Goldie then lept out the open window:

So naughty, frightened little Goldilocks jumped; and whether she broke her neck in the fall, or ran into the wood and was lost there, or found her way out of the wood and got whipped for being a bad girl and playing truant, no one can say. But the Three Bears never saw anything more of her.

That ends the most famous portion of the iconic tale. But let me relate to you the part you never heard. You see, Papa Bear was the managing editor of an independent newspaper. He had been working there for 30 years. Part of his job was to read the letters the paper received every week.

He looked forward to it, even though not all of the letters were  complimentary. He thus learned to keep the letters in two folders. One he called “fan mail,” containing encouraging, friendly letters, and the other he labeled “hate mail,” some of which contained words he could not repeat in the pages of his newspaper.

Over the decades, the “fan mail” folder was always significantly thicker than the “hate mail” folder. After all, readers of his newspaper, The Bare Truth, were intelligent, mostly middle-class American bears who appreciated the paper’s pledge “to report on events vital to your welfare but which are hushed up or distorted by the controlled press.”

That meant Papa Bear was obliged to give the good news and the bad, no matter who the subject of the story was. He fortified himself by remembering the words of one of his favorite human orators, Thomas Jefferson:

For here we are not afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it.

But Papa Bear noticed something inexplicable. After the re-election of President Orange Bear, the “hate mail” file started getting thicker than the “fan mail” file. And the emails (the way that Papa Bear prefers to receive letters because it makes his life so much easier) started getting longer and more critical of his paper’s coverage of President Orange Bear.

That all comes as no surprise, as this Orange Bear character is a complicated animal, capable of moments of true compassion but susceptible to frenetic episodes of umbrageous behavior—a beast who elicits a wide range of emotions from hate to love.

But here’s what was a surprise to Papa Bear: His readers, who had, over the decades, been in total agreement with one another on almost all the biggest topics, were on Polar Bear opposites of this Orange Bear issue.

In fact, in one week, Papa Bear received letters from two longtime subscribers who were cancelling their subscriptions—one because the paper was unforgiveably soft on Orange Bear and the other because his newspaper was being too anti-Orange Bear. They wanted all of the reporting on Orange Bear to mirror their conceived notion of “just right.”

After puzzling over it for a while, Papa Bear realized that there is no such thing as a “just right” newspaper. The “news” isn’t “just right.” Facts are. The only course to take was to keep telling the truth, no matter what bears (or humans) his paper gored.

By the way, the original ending of the story wasn’t too bright. The bears were originally a trio of bachelors, and the intruder was a “nasty old woman.” In some renditions the hag is jailed. In others she is lost forever in the woods. (Had she been 13,  I’d have told them to look on Epstein Island.)

Fair warning: In  the even older oral folk versions of the story, the complaining nag is impaled on the spire of a local edifice by Papa Bear.

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