Bern, baby, bern!

I can't believe I failed to connect this:

with this:

I mean, "The right has their racist frog," so the left needs a bear -- followed by a pun on the noun and verb senses of bear. How did I not immediately make the connection?

In the same movie, Kermit says, "C'mon, bear, burn rubber!" The combination of a bear, burning, and going fast in a car syncs with "Let's Go" Brandon Brown. (C'mon is roughly synonymous with "Let's go," and is a known Bidenism.)

According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, the English words bear and brown come from "a Proto-Indo-European root meaning 'bright; brown' (the sense connection might involve polished wooden objects)." I find this a very curious connection, since brown is one of the least bright of colors; of all the basic color terms in English, only black and gray are less often qualified as "bright" than brown is. Brown is not alone in this, though. The very least bright color of all, black, comes from the Old English blac "bright, shining, glittering, pale" and is related to French blanc, "white"; the OED speculates "the connecting notions being, perhaps, 'fire' (bright) and 'burned' (dark)." Perhaps this is also the connecting notion for brown; it certainly seems more plausible than the "bright as wood" idea.

By a very strange coincidence, the bear is also etymologically connected to the idea of burning in Chinese, a language completely unrelated to English. The Old Chinese character for "bear" was 能, and the term for a blazing or raging fire was 熊熊 -- made from the character for "bear" by adding a component meaning "flame." Later, the characer 能 began to be used for a completely different word (meaning "can, ability") and so 熊 (originally referring to a blazing fire) was pressed into service as the character for "bear."

Even more curiously, dictionaries say that 能 (originally "bear," the animal) was also used in the past to mean "to bear, to withstand" and "bearing, attitude" -- exhibiting some of the same polysemy as the English word bear.

There's something mysterious about bears. Beowulf's name means "bear"; so does King Arthur's. There are two constellations called Bears even though their most salient feature is their long tails. (The constellation-inspired myths about how the bear lost his long tail don't address the question of why the ancients would have called the long-tailed shape they saw in the stars a "bear" in the first place.) The universal and enduring popularity of the teddy bear also calls for some explanation, I think -- and no, some anecdote about an American politician ages ago isn't enough to explain why the idea took off and became so popular all over the world.