Squirrels: A Political Allegory [UPDATED]
One morning early this month, I noticed that my cats were riveted by something outside the glass porch door. Two sawed-off young squirrels, perfect miniatures not half the size of a grown one, plumy tails carried forward over their backs like comb-overs, were apparently taunting the cats — leaping on the screen, running up and down it, all but sticking out their tongues and flapping tiny fingers. They were either too young and dumb to know what a cat was, or they were smart enough to understand that these couldn’t get at them. They were having fun.
I had what a soft-hearted, mush-headed human being thinks is a good idea: I threw a handful of birdseed on the porch from last year’s failed bird feeder (which was, of course, taken over by squirrels) to keep them coming. Everyone was having such a good time. No harm, no foul.
And of course, they kept coming with a vengeance, sometimes two, sometimes just one, vacuuming up the birdseed and giving the cats’ nervous systems a workout.
I don’t know when it happened, but this morning I looked out and saw two young squirrels of very different sizes. One was about 2/3 the size of an adult and the other was tiny, about 1/3 the size. And lo and behold, the hefty one was driving away the little one. He/she/it seemed almost more interested in defending its territory than in eating: every time the tiny, obviously very hungry (to a human’s imagination) squirrel ventured timidly towards the food, the big one aggressively chased it off. Only then would the hefty one return to eating, literally scooping the seeds together with its paws and shoveling them into its mouth.
There are two possibilities here. One is that we have two siblings, one of whom is succeeding at the other’s expense. Happens all the time in nature. Two or three cubs or kits or chicks are born and the balance tips early on: one or more gain an edge and use that greater strength to gain more and more strength until the the weak ones starve to death. Baby birds of many species in the nest will even shove their weaker sibling overboard, or peck him/her to death. Parents do not intervene. It’s a jungle out there, and you have to be capable of looking out for yourself.
The other possibility is that the little one is simply younger, a baby squirrel from another, later litter, and the big one is chasing away a genetically unrelated (or less-related) competitor. In that case, it’s just a matter of first come, first served. Who said life was fair?
Having already screwed with nature by putting out this unnatural treasure trove of food, now what (if anything) do I do? The point is not what I do, but the political correlates of my conflicting impulses.
Do I let the cats out? You know what would happen — not what I intended: they would get the little one. (But then at least its existence wouldn’t be for naught. They also serve who only die and are eaten.)
Do I intervene on behalf of the little one, driving the big one away? This would be the liberal solution, but also the Christian one. God created all and He loves the weak — with their less obvious, less material strengths — even more than the strong. He just has an awfully funny way of showing it. But He created soft-hearted humans and bags of birdseed to redress the imbalance.
Or do I (pretending I haven’t already skewed things) “let nature take its course,” even secretly admiring its ruthless efficiency at selecting the most resourceful and robust?
Is the big squirrel the better businessman who drives inefficient competitors out of town? Or the amoral businessbrute who will do whatever it takes to succeed? Is it Bill Gates, enforcing the de facto monopoly of mediocrity that he got by being first out of the gate? Is it Wal-Mart, using the size it has already gained to prevent start-ups from getting market share? Is it an African kleptocrat stealing all the aid while the intended beneficiaries starve?
What I do: throw more handfuls of seed out there (bailing out General Motors? no, that would be an old, toothless squirrel) in the hope that Biggie will get so full that he/she staggers off belching before all the food is gone. And that’s exactly what happens: the little one gets a chance! But whether because it is younger or weaker, it is indeed an inefficient eater, picking up seeds slowly, one at a time, and leaving before it has made much of a dent in the remainder.
You just can’t help some squirrels. Even God helps those who help themselves.
~ amba
UPDATE: Just spoke to a friend, the same one referenced in the post on saving newspapers. I helped him write a foundation mission statement, and in the process learned a great deal about the futility, if not harmfulness, of much development aid. Out of the blue, he happened to tell me that in a project he once supported in Haiti, where an idealistic doctor is trying to produce peanut butter to nourish children’s brains in the crucial years up to age 5, even if they manage to get the peanut butter made and distributed to homes, the children’s stronger older siblings steal the peanut butter from the little ones and eat it themselves.
It’s Not About the Bike.
Danny MacAskill rides one as if it were a dressage-trained Lippizaner that moonlighted doing stunts in action movies.
My Hopelessly Quixotic Idea for Saving Newspapers
I was talking with a friend in St. Louis today, and he was telling me that he’d read that the ship’s captain held hostage by pirates had jumped overboard, not out of an excess of courage or desperation, but in a by-the-books strategy — to give allies the all-clear to blow the lifeboat out of the water. But, my friend said, they could not do so because President Obama had given the order that no one, no one, was to be killed.
But, I said, I thought Obama ultimately gave the order to kill the pirates if necessary.
No, my friend said, he never gave that order, he just took credit for it. The captain of the rescue ship issued the order, overriding the president’s order not to shoot to kill on the basis that there was clear and present danger to the hostage captain’s life.
That may well be true, I said, but then again it may not. There are people who are extremely eager to discredit President Obama who would say it even if it wasn’t true. And then there are his defenders who would deny it even if it was.
So how can we know what really happened?
We can’t.
My friend and I agreed on that: more and more, there is noplace to find objective, researched and documented truth (presuming there even is such a thing). There is left spin and right spin, and there is only faster or slower spin.
I told him about Snopes.com (he didn’t know it), and how reassuring it is to be able to go and check an urban legend or rumor with someone who has researched it. I said I didn’t think they vetted “news” stories so much, but of course what they do borders on the news and sometimes crosses that border. [UPDATE: And sure enough, Snopes has taken on the exact story about Obama’s wussy vacillation that my friend must have read and believed — drawing on NBC and Washington Times reporting. Go here to find out their verdict.] My friend and I lamented how newspapers used to at least have the reputation for fact checking and objectivity — “but they lost that a long time ago,” my friend said.
That was when it struck me: could this be a new (or renewed) role for newspapers?
The frightening thing about their demise, for those (few) of us who’d like to get at least a sense of what might have actually happened, is that there will no longer be even the pretense of, not even a half-hearted attempt at, reportorial and editorial standards. Everyone will just say whatever they want you to believe, and consume whatever propaganda tells them what they want to hear. There will be no investigative reporters who get paid to be our eyes and ears, who go to the ends of the earth to try to get a read on what actually happened, whether we (or “they”) like it or not.
Could newspapers do this? (Evidently the Washington Times is doing it — in this case, debunking a story that some of their readers might have preferred to be true.) Could they once again, or perhaps for the first time, become the Snopeses of history in the making, refusing spin of any valence (or reporting it as such), priding themselves on hunting, if not the Truth, at least the elusive, unbought, beholden-to-no-one Fact?
Two questions immediately arise: is there such a thing? Has there ever been? Or is every story Rashomon, the plot depending on where you stand?
And even supposing there is such a thing, is there much of an audience for it? Was there ever, or have “facts” always been whores in respectable dress?
Both painful, and pivotal, questions.
Cancun Crowd Control
While her post is a tad snarky at times, this woman’s systematic response to the airport woes of some 200 fellow passengers was impressive.
-Randy
Why We Cry
To communicate … and perhaps to manipulate, says John Tierney of the New York Times, reporting on recent research:
“Emotional tears are a breakthrough in the evolution of humans as a social species,” says Dr. [Robert] Provine, a neuroscientist at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County … in Evolutionary Psychology (pdf).
The Longest Day: My Excellent Adventures Offline
I. I don’t know exactly what made me decide to take an Internet sabbath yesterday. I think it was Twitter that was the last straw. Now I had a new thing to run and check every few minutes, and before each segment of my workout, and instead of vacuuming, and . . . there I was, ending a long yet too-quick day, already riddled with time online, by catching up with the whole Twitter stream and even trying to goose it along a little bit, refreshing the browser in the hope that someone would still say something . . . My disabled husband was deteriorating from neglect (and my deadline excuse ended Friday), my young Siamese cat came and stared intently cross-eyed into my eyes, touched my face with a paw to invite me to play, and I couldn’t be bothered because I was reading somebody’s damned tweet, or writing one.
I was disgusted with myself, and a little alarmed. When I first got to New York, 21 and very shy, at some point I realized I was using a glass or two of wine to loosen up socially. That dependency set off an alarm bell and I stopped drinking anything alcoholic for a while. This was like that.
I didn’t have any big plans to quit — going online is not a dangerous drug, after all, it’s a semi-productive and understandably beguiling activity — just take a day off to break the insidious stranglehold it was getting on me, like some caressing, immobilizing vine. The only way to do it was to decide that going online Sunday was simply not an option. When at one point I needed to look up a medical item in my archived e-mail — the only time I touched the computer all day — I felt a stab of panic and hope: how could I do that without getting today’s e-mail, and thereby getting sucked back into the vortex? Much as I felt the sick habitual tug, I really didn’t want to go there. Simple: turn off AirPort.
But what if my parents try to reach me, and worry? They’ll call you, idiot. Better yet, you call them.
II. An hour or two in — time spent doing chores with uncommon focus and dispatch — I think, I feel like a better person already.
I think about how much fun it will be to go online tomorrow and post about what a better person I was when I wasn’t online.
Notice that with chagrin. Think, what the hell. Might as well go online right now and write a post called “Failed Experiment,” concluding that I am a bad person.
Oh, no you don’t. Not an option.
So then I think of writing all these thoughts down so I can make them into a funny post tomorrow. (And I actually did: otherwise I’d never remember all this.) My funny post will be famous: most e-mailed! Most tweeted! And then I think, what the &%@#?! I’m not online, and I’m still online! I’m still playing the game, still not playing with the cat, cleaning up, or working out, much less attending to my husband.
III. Every time I have a thought, even a trivial one, I feel an urge to share and/or display it — because I can. Each thought coins itself in crisp, sharp words, almost as if already typed out. But if I don’t actually type it out, it will quickly blur, and then dissolve and be washed away without a trace, the way most thoughts in human heads were before all this was invented. Why did you think they were called “passing thoughts,” dolt?
The reality, though, is that even if I do type it out, it will still blur, dissolve, and be washed away. We’re all thinking into the Intertubes the way we’re pissing into the plumbing: the vast majority of our thoughts merely mingle as they flow through the sewer system and out to sea.
No matter. If I’ve typed mine out in a public place, even if no one sees or remembers them, I’ve written my “Kilroy Was Here” on an underpass of the universe.
IV. I develop a grudging new respect for the people who are online to flog blogs and Twitter for commerce. At least they’re getting something out of it besides primate jollies. It’s mortifying to be spending so much time in what is essentially glorified grooming.
V. God, there’s a lot of time out here!
On a usual Sunday morning, the beginning of This Week overtakes me: I look up from the computer screen and I’ve already missed the first ten minutes. This morning I wait for ten o’clock and it dawdles and dallies toward me. It’s 9:50! I go into the bathroom and read an old Vanity Fair for half an hour. I come out and it’s 9:55!
This is refreshing, especially when you’ve been feeling like you were lashed to the front of a bullet train hurtling deathwards. I feel as if I’ve suddenly stumbled on the secret of long life and it isn’t, like we joke in my family, Keep breathing! It’s Quit tweeting!
There is lots of time — more than you know what to do with — and there is also a superabundance of free attention to lavish on each thing you do, to surround it with from all sides. Each thing you do is very three-dimensional; you have time on your hands and bandwidth in your brain to contemplate it from infinite angles, like Picasso. You realize you’ve been living in Flatland — everything reduced to a screen.
I discover what I’ve been escaping from. I discover the bleakness of paying steady attention to a mentally disabled companion. I discover that it would be possible to clean house incessantly, as my mother almost does — there’s always one more thing to put away or wipe up — and what does it get you? A clean house.
J confounds all my resolutions to dedicate myself to his revival; all he wants to do is sleep. So I tackle my files. I compulsively organized them once before, but then for a year or more I just threw everything into a bottom file drawer, to be sorted out “later.” But now it’s later: I’m going to have to do the taxes, so I tear through these piles of paper fast and furiously, throwing an enormous amount out (envelopes, fly cards, bill inserts) and organizing the rest. Being an all-or-nothing kind of person, I save and file scrupulously by date things I know I’ll probably never need. Unless the IRS audits me. But I don’t feel there’s order unless there’s order down to the bone. That’s why I let things get into such a mess, if that makes any sense at all.
It’s only when I take a break from filing that I feel a pang of the urge to spend my break online, and it’s only habit — each pang gets fainter, like fading echoes.
I do laundry. I hand-wash my delicate shirts. I vacuum. Finally J wakes up and agrees to work out with me. And he starts to come out of his decline and daze. For the first time since before I went to Florida, he can stand up with the walker just long and strong enough for me to grab the waistband of his pants (I’m standing on the bed with one foot on the seat of the wheelchair) and swivel him into the wheelchair. He does some vestigial stretches and karate punches sitting down, and I see the moment when he comes even more into focus. After we work out I take him to K&W Cafeteria for supper. We come home and I watch The Negotiator and In Treatment with him. I get him into bed. I play with Rainy for a good long time.
Only then do I warily circle around writing this. I feel as if I’ve completely lost the fevered beat, and it feels good, like finally getting free of an earworm. It’s reassuring that I can de-adapt so fast. And it’s pleasurable, so I’ll want to do it again.
VI. I still don’t think the Internet is a bad drug. On the contrary. The blogosphere and the Twitterverse are places of amazing ferment: a hive mind to which each brings a dab of nectar; a teeming sourdough starter for the next culture. Their genius — and their jonesiness — is being at once a place to chatter and brag and play for laughs, as comes so naturally to us tribal primates, and a place of contagion and mutation, an agora where ideas cross-fertilize as fast as viruses swap genes.
It’s just that, like anything, it isn’t everything. And when it starts to become everything, it’s time to turn off, tune out, and drop in. Real life is the mother lode. The more you go there, the more you’ll have to bring back.
~ amba
“Home of the Misdemeanor Wiener.”
“Food so good it’s criminal!” That’s “Felony Franks,” one (legally blind) Chicago businessman’s vision for employing ex-offenders. A local alderman and a local ex-felon don’t share his sense of humor. It’s the name they object to, not the mission. What do you think? Does the name “elevate the life of crime,” or lower the barrier of automatic mistrust and stigma with a laugh?
“Genetic analysis shows the flu strain is a never-before-seen mixture of swine, human and avian viruses.”
The little buggers have been swapping bodily fluids again.
The fact most of the dead [in Mexico] were aged between 25 and 45 was seen as a worrying sign linked to pandemics, as seasonal flu tends to be more deadly among the elderly and the very young. […]
The last flu pandemic was in 1968 when “Hong Kong” flu killed about a million people globally.
But every cloud has a silver lining, every threat and disaster its entrepreneurial beneficiary:
DVD rental stores said customers poured in to rent movies on Friday night so they could huddle inside for the weekend.
(Off topic, it’s kind of a sad sign of the times, the implication that people can’t stay home without a DVD. It makes some part of me snark that this recession hasn’t gone nearly deep enough — not even in Mexico.)
No Port in a Storm
Jeez. You can’t even take your frustration out on things any more. Even they defend themselves. Is nothing inanimate??
Exasperated at having to stop proofreading and change the bed (really, in the grand scheme of things, which is more important? Answer: neither!), I yanked the crank on the bed with heedless violence. The crank flew off and whacked me above the right ear, just where you’d tap someone with a sap to knock them out. I didn’t pass out, or see double or anything, but I had an instant bump there, and a mild headache for a couple hours. (No, I have not so far succeeded in doing an auto-Natasha Richardson, though I seem to be trying.)
Smash a plate (very satisfying, by the way!) and you’re sure to step on a shard of it and cut your foot. Punch a wall, break your hand. Slapstick movies are full of this wisdom, and express it far better than fatuous New Age types who would say something like, “The universe is a mirror.” Or, “What you give is what you get.”
Actually, you can abuse people more easily than things. People give, they yield like reeds because they need. Things don’t give a f*ck. They are resistant and rebellious and absolutely honest. They reflect your treatment of them, your attitude toward them, faithfully and without delay. They will repay clumsy, sullen, savage, or indifferent handling with a poke in the eye right here, right now, not years later in divorce court.
Ambiance 