Did your parents ever scold you about playing with ants?  Don’t play with ants!!!

 

Maybe it was just a boy-thing when I was a kid.  Incinerating ants with magnifying glasses; having ant wars where you’d take a hostage ant from one colony and drop it onto another’s anthole and watch the torture proceed; or placing an ant on a popsicle stick and floating it down a post-torrent’s curbside gutter stream towards an ominously-sucking sewer cover. 

 

Had I grown up within a strict Jainist religious tradition (they are known to avoid any activities destructive of insect life and to even foster insect hospitals), I’d probably never have practiced such juvenile myrmecide, but may well have rather grown up a founding father of PETI (People for Ethical Treatment of Insects):

Do you realize how many bugs you can kill on a simple drive of 60 miles? Thousands. And you heartlessly scrape them off your windshield. Think about the poor little bug families who lost a mother or father because you chose to go the speed limit.

Studies have shown that at speeds of less than 35 mph bugs will blow past your car, and survive. At speeds greater than 35 mph they splatter.

Stop the carnage. Save the bugs. Lower the speed limits on our interstates to 35 mph.

 So maybe cops today are so tolerant of speeding because they approve of anti-insect rage?!

 

And if you’re an enlightened driver, maybe you’ll swerve to spare the butterflies but slay the mosquitoes?  Or spare the mosquitoes, but slay the ants?

 

This latter strategy was precisely the strategy employed by French medicine during the early days in building the Panama Canal across the Isthmus of Panama.  At the end of the 19^th century, the best and the brightest of French business visionaries and engineers had been commissioned and sent to Panama to construct the “Canal Interoceanique,” but they encountered two deadly, formidable foes: yellow fever and malaria.  French doctors were wise enough to theorize that insects were transmitting the disease to man, but when they looked about for the likely culprit, they dismissed the tiny jungle mosquito (“how could anything so small kill a great big man?”) and instead focused upon the any number of varieties of jungle ants, some of which (army ants) were known to cut paths even through the densest jungle.  (And I can confirm that—as I once watched a swarming colony of army ants cut through a six-foot high field of Panama grass—and, no, it wasn’t Red ),

 

Desperate and acting fast upon this notion, in one particular French hospital set up to care for the feverishly-stricken, doctors and nurses placed pots of water (cheap) under all four bedposts of every hospital bed to baffle the ubiquitously wandering “man-killing” ants.  And baffle them they did !  Ants drowned like the Egyptians trying to follow the Jews across the temporarily-parted Red Sea.  One related spin-off “nuisance” was that the pots of water also served as brooding pools for the tiny no-see-um mosquitoes.  But the French were willing to live with that “minor annoyance.”  After all, what was a little itchy-squiter bite compared to the deadly malarial or yellow fever suck of those nasty ant-fucks?!

 

Wrong!  As everyone now knows, it was precisely the tiny buzzing squiters that were decimating the French in droves.  That particular French hospital, by the way, experienced nearly 100% mortality—duh!

 

So, are you prepared to trust your doctor today?  Did you say sure?!

 

Well, keep in mind the sign in an autobody repair shop that read  “Good, Cheap, Fast—Pick Two”  and then read this:

 

Before the invention of anesthesia, speed was a highly regarded trait in a surgeon.  Dr. Robert Liston of London was among the fastest.  But, speed comes with some cost.  In one particular operation, Liston killed three people.  The patient actually survived, but later died of gangrene.  During the operation, Liston accidentally cut of the fingers of his surgical assistant, who soon died from an infection.  Liston even managed to slash through the coattails of a colleague who was observing the operation - he was so sure that his vital organs had been punctured that he died of fright! 

 

Source:  Oops!  by Paul Kirchner, 1996, Rhino Records

 

… Just remember that ant.
Oops there goes another rubber tree plant.  (1)
Oops there goes another rubber tree plant.  (2)
Oops there goes another rubber tree plant.  (3)

 

   —Sammy Cahn

Warrior’s Darkside
Conforming for its own sake is a sin.


I need to get back to battling terrorists.
 Lest I become one.  Or maybe I have already.
Even if they’re (we’re) hiding in caves on Mars.
“If we’re going to die, we’re going to die on my terms.”
Sentient, intrepid, contending, empowered, strong.
"If we’re going to die, come on, let's get it on."
Nothing wrong with going out together.
It’s a lot easier than dealing
with the drugs of undoing, 
with disappearing lovers, 
and disappointing whores,
disenchanting friends,
and the strangulation
of world corporate organization
defining me (us) as
mere means to an
economic end
ground 
zero