Rick's May Tirade
A Bug's Death
Murder is a dark and loathsome business, nerve-wracking for the
perpetrator and terminally inconvenient for the victim. Killing in
mass quantities is even more unsettling, the stuff of squawking
headlines and everlasting infamy.
Let me tell you about my own shocking descent into mass murder.
I've kept my shame a secret until now, but circumstances impel me to
unburden myself, to make a full and open confession. That my victims
were insects should not detract from the edifying nature of my
account. That they were insects of a particularly obnoxious breed
should win me a small degree of indulgence from my more sympathetic
readers. But the fact remains that I have inflicted death, and the
hands that type these words have been stained with the oozing
innards of innumerable winged creatures.
When I first noticed them a few months ago, dancing and swirling
under the hanging lamp in my dining room, I paid them little heed.
After all, what was the harm in harboring a small family of
houseflies in winter? I was charitable enough to grant them shelter
through the chilly months and let them go about their affairs. As
Tristram Shandy's gentle Uncle Toby said to the fly as he spared its
life, "The world is surely wide enough to hold both thee and
me."
My bachelor quarters were surely wide enough to hold a few
inoffensive flying bugs, even if they were commonly reviled by the
masses. I bore them no grudge: they didn't harass me like
mosquitoes; they weren't equipped with nasty stingers like wasps and
hornets. I smiled upon them and let the matter pass.
One evening a few weeks later, after returning from a long day at
the office, I noticed that my insect companions were suddenly more
numerous than they had been the day before. The population swirling
under the dining room lamp had grown from three or four to somewhere
in the upper teens, and the bathroom buzzed with more of the
houseflies' hyperactive kin.
The critters had been using my abode to be fruitful and multiply,
and I drew the line at extending my hospitality to their offspring.
My territorial integrity was being compromised, and something had to
be done. Nothing turns a pacifist into a warrior like the invasion
of his home turf. This was war.
I grabbed a plant spray bottle from the kitchen and filled it
with water, adjusting the nozzle to produce a thin but forceful
stream. Then I headed straight for the bathroom and set my sights on
a fly that had come to rest midway up the mirror, directly in front
of me and my newfound weapon. Two quick zaps of the spray bottle --
a hit! As I watched the stunned insect tumble to the top of the
sink, I put out my thumb, paused a second to ponder its fate -- and
smashed the little bug flat. Suddenly it was a former fly, free to
join the souls of its ancestors in that great celestial cesspool.
The execution had been swift and, I trust, painless.
I had killed, and I regret to tell you that I found the
experience exhilarating. Not so much the snuffing of the little life
-- that was a purely utilitarian solution to my overpopulation
problem. No, what pumped the endorphins through my system was the
joy of hitting the target, of asserting my territorial rights in
such a savage and direct manner. There was something indescribably
delicious about taking aim and finding my mark, a primal euphoria I
shared with the blunt-faced heathens who first flung a spear into
the heaving hide of a cave bear. This was a classic "guy
thing."
In the days that followed, my ardor for the chase became a
mission, a calling, a holy war. I zapped them in the bathtub, I
zapped them on the tiles, I zapped them on the medicine cabinet; I
would never surrender. The thrill of combat became a driving
libidinal force, an outlet for aggressions formerly suppressed by
overcivilized values, a source of quick victories that must have
boosted my testosterone to levels commonly found among fraternity
brothers and Zulu warlords. I was relishing the magic elixir of
absolute power. "Look on my spray bottle, ye houseflies, and
despair!"
Though I seemed to possess an unfair advantage over my miniscule
foes, the two sides were, in fact, quite evenly matched. The flies
could dominate with their speed, agility, and awesome penchant for
reproduction, while I brought my spray bottle, lethal thumb, and
marginally superior IQ to the conflict.
In the timeless warrior tradition, I acquired a profound respect
for my adversaries. What perfect little machines they were, so
admirably adapted to the ancient game of survival. Outfitted with
the hundred eyes of Argus and reflexes to match, they effortlessly
eluded many of my best shots. In air combat they were almost
invincible; I'd fire at their squadrons five, six, seven times in
succession, hoping to send just one tiny aircraft plummeting to the
floor. Once or twice I succeeded, but they had an uncanny knack for
swooping out of danger. I knew that if I wanted to stop the
invasion, I had to take them on land. And so I did.
Soon the horizontal surfaces of my bathroom were strewn with tiny
black corpses; water dripped from the walls. With each twist of my
thumb, I watched three hundred million years of evolution expire
like an unrenewed vehicle registration. The carnage began to weigh
upon my conscience. I now found myself hesitating before I flattened
the flies that tumbled from my latest blasts.
Sometimes I'd let my resident spider do the dirty work for me.
Lurking in its well-placed lair beneath the mirror, it would pounce
upon a fallen fly and, with alarming swiftness, wrap it in a silken
straitjacket. I could almost hear the muffled little voice buzzing
its final cry of distress... "Hep me, hep me."
My compassion for the enemy reached a peak as I watched one
waterlogged fly drag itself onto a ledge above the sink. With nimble
feline movements of its forelegs, it groomed its bedraggled body and
carefully straightened its wings. I couldn't bring myself to deliver
the coup de grace. This fly had become more than an abstract enemy;
it was now an individual, struggling like all of us individuals to
escape the inevitable thumb of death. Who was I to deprive this
particular fly -- let's call him Edgar -- of his right to romp in
rotting garbage, savor the fragrant contents of the cat litter box,
or find fulfillment with a six-legged kindred spirit? Who was I to
rob him of his memories -- of life as a maggot, of lyrical evenings
around the toilet bowl, of riotous midair joyrides with his chums?
One twist of my thumb and everything he had would vanish in an
instant. I couldn't do it. Once Edgar had dried himself off, I
granted him his freedom to rejoin his peers and get lucky with
Louise or Lucille. I had acquired a fatal sympathy for the doomed.
I began to realize that the secret of war -- of all mass murder
-- is to deny the individuality of the designated victim. That's
what makes the killing so damned easy: we convert our victims into
abstract symbols. Instead of individual Edgars and Louises, we see a
swarm of houseflies -- or, depending on the setting and
circumstances, a swarm of Serbs, Kosovars, Israelis, Palestinians,
blacks, honkies, jocks or geeks. With bloodcurdling Old Testament
justice, guilt is determined solely on the basis of membership in
the wrong tribe.
Terrorists think they're killing symbols, but the blood is shed
by individuals -- people with unique dreams, experiences, fears,
fingerprints, hobbies and personality quirks. To a terrorist,
victims are interchangeable commodities; it makes no difference
whose blood goes trickling down the sidewalk. When terrorism rules,
the subtle distinctions between individuals become as irrelevant as
the color of their underwear.
The two boys who perpetrated the infamous Columbine High School
Massacre had nursed a grudge against the in-crowders who ridiculed
and rejected them. Embittered by the ruthless sociology of
adolescence, they plotted a wild revenge. Yet did they take the
trouble to single out the individuals who had made their lives
miserable? No, they took lives at random, as if their targets had
been insects. One student was as guilty as another, in-crowd bully
or not. Didn't the assassins recognize the faces attached to the
bodies they blew away? Apparently not. With shocking impersonality,
the killers condemned their victims to a bug's death.
So it goes with other self-appointed executioners. Timothy
McVeigh knew none of the 168 souls he blasted to smithereens in
Oklahoma City. The Turks bore no animosity toward the individual
Armenians they eliminated in 1915; my great-grandfather was dragged
from his home and never seen again -- but it was nothing personal.
Ditto for the Jewish, Slavic and Gypsy multitudes who perished in
the death camps of World War II; ditto for the victims of ethnic
rampages in Rwanda and old Yugoslavia.
You'd think the human brain, an organ so highly touted by our
species' own publicists, would have developed the capacity to
distinguish inoffensive individuals from those who cause undue
grief. Better yet, you'd think we might have evolved to the point
where we require no victims at all. But some malign bloodlust in our
prehistoric genes demands a general retribution. Simply being born
into the wrong tribe becomes a criminal offense, and the guilty must
die -- like so many houseflies.
Back to my story. A few weeks after de-escalating my war against
the few surviving flies, I returned one evening to find the entire
apartment humming with insect life. A new brood had just ripened
from maggothood to maturity, and it had been a bumper crop. Every
room now swarmed with dancing, droning flies; my territory had been
entirely annexed by the enemy.
The old bottle-and-thumb mode of warfare could never prevail
against such staggering numbers. My final solution had to be quick
and deadly. It was both.
With a mixture of sorrow and relief, I watched the little bodies
accumulate on the flypaper that I hung from the bathroom and dining
room lamps -- dozens the first hour, over a hundred by the end of
the next day, many of them still alive, bodies writhing and legs
wiggling as their energy slowly deserted them. I was witnessing a
scene from Dante's Inferno, with the La Brea Tar Pits thrown in for
good measure.
Moved by pity for the six-legged sufferers, I delivered a quick
death-tweak to as many as I could. But new flies joined their ranks
every minute, and my own fingers were getting mired on the tacky
surface. Eventually I simply turned my back and walked away. I would
let the flypaper do the deed.
It proved to be the ultimate killing machine. How admirably
efficient and impersonal it was, in the best tradition of
twentieth-century death-camp bureaucracy. I didn't have to soil my
hands with another body.
By the end of a week the flypaper was black with accumulated
corpses, piled together in a frozen frenzy of death. I counted over
320 former individuals on the two death-strips before I tossed them
into the garbage. No doubt my old friend Edgar was among them, but I
couldn't recognize him now. He was just another dead housefly.
Here's the complete archive of Rick Bayan's immortal tirades for your reading pleasure:
December 2002 — Hello, I Must Be Going
November 2002 — A Raving Moderate
August 2002 — Is Western Civilization Worth Saving?
July 2002 — To Scam or Be Scammed
June 2002 — I Read the News Today, Oh Boy
May 2002 — Speechophobia
April 2002 — Fanatics on Parade
March 2002 — The Prestige Gap: A Lament
February 2002 — On Becoming a Dullard
January 2002 — Art for Slackers
December 2001 — An Unsolicited Christmas Card
November 2001 — A Tale of Two Tribes
October 2001 — On the Fallen Towers
August 2001 — Why Do We Bother?
June 2001 — Notes from a Doomed Planet
May 2001 — The Museum of Discarded Names
April 2001 — Indecision
March 2001 — A Slight Case of Insanity
February 2001 — Letter to a Conscientious Critic
January 2001 — The Cynic's Inaugural Address
December 2000 — The 50th Tirade
November 2000 — Travel Advisory
October 2000 — Beyond Work
September 2000 — More Work
August 2000 — Work
July 2000 — The Doves' Nest
June 2000 — Great Affectations
May 2000 — Tale of a Virtual Village
April 2000 — The World Is My Obstacle Course
March 2000 — A Living Heck
February 2000 — On the Treachery
of Time
January 2000 — A Letter to the
Future
December 99 — Rare Bird
November 99 — Not Just Another
Obscure Ethnic Group
October 99 — Extinction Reconsidered
September 99 — Good Life, Bad
Life, Better Life
August 99 — Household Relics:
An Elegy
July 99 — A Meditation on Profanity
June 99 — In Praise of Sloth
May 99 — A Bug's Death
April 99 — Obligations!
March 99 — The Courage to Be Ordinary
February 99 — A Grave Story
January 99 — What's Left for
Men?
December 98 — On the Uses of
Friends
November 98 — A Cynic's Thanksgiving
October 98 — Grand Illusions
September 98 — Filth
August 98 — Will the Real God
Please Stand Up?
July 98 — Adventures in Downsizing
June 98 — Lady Longevity
May 98 — Uniquely Human, Uniquely
Clueless
April 98 — The Mathematics of Excess
March 98 — Humbuggery
February 98 — Love and the Single
Cynic
January 98 — By the Sweat of
Your Brow
December 97 — Is Suffering Unfashionable?
November 97 — The Tao of Housekeeping
October 97 — The Sensory Deprivation
Blues
September 97 — Down with Natural
Selection!
August 97 — Noise
July 97 — On Eating Our Fellow Creatures
June 97 — Trouble in Book-Land
May 97 — Interview with an Unemployable
Man
April 97 — The Cynic's Dream
March 97 — Inequalities
February 97 — Flesh and Mortality
January 97 — How to Be a Success
December 96 — Why I Can't Hate
Christmas
November 96 — How I Became a Cynic
