God in His wisdom made the fly /And then forgot to tell us why.
— Ogden Nash, “The Fly”
This relationship we have with bugs is a queer one. On again, off again. (OK, really just off again.) And it was all weaned in early childhood when we tried to suckle on the teat of wisdom and were struck dumb by the imbecility of youth.
Remember how, for a few minutes one summer, we loved bugs and all the extraordinary erudition they taught us?
We could drop them down the back of a girl’s dress, fill a jar with them and take them home, or… uh, well, that’s about it. Yes, we loved them mightily, so much so that we weren’t afraid to turn into malicious little Nazis for a forgiven blink in time – holding them prisoner in a jar or, like some Old Testament god, stuffing them into someone’s sleeping bag at Scout camp, or into someone’s mouth in the bathroom of the youth detention centre.
That taught us the element of surprise.
The collecting jar where we mixed black ants with red ants and watched them bounce around as we shook it, then watched closer as they tore each other to exoskeletal shreds.
That taught us how some species just never get along.
“Don’t forget to punch some holes in the top of the jar so they can breathe.”
Parents used to feel obliged to say that because they’d read in Reader’s Digest that they should really say something. Do insects in fact breathe? I think not, but I haven’t checked either. Nor am I going to. Anyway, that lesson taught us to follow the rule of authority.
Sitting on the hot pavement, fixing the sun’s rays through dad’s magnifying glass, we learned how a homemade laser would burn through an insect’s armour plating with a nauseating crackle and pop like panels of the neighbour’s fence tossed on a drunken bonfire. Joyfully (and strangely) we simultaneously learnt about both sadism and futuristic military weaponry.
And this was very, very important. Because it taught us that lasers and fire would be the only things to stop bugs when they turned bad.
And they did.
Don’t believe me?
You only have to look at some reliable documentary footage to realize that bugs are capable of growing into behemoths at whim — or at least when they sniff some radioactive fallout — and terrorizing humankind!
Consider the cinematic testimony:
Them: world attacked by atomically enlarged ants.
The Monster from Green Hell: world attacked by atomically enlarged wasps.
Beginning of the End: world attacked by atomically enlarged locusts.
The Deadly Mantis: world attacked by atomically enlarged preying mantis.
Mothra: world attacked by atomically enlarged Japanese guy in moth suit.
Tarantula: world attacked by… uh, you get it, right?
The war with insects is on now. They’re just not telling us. Like Bhopal, and that meteorite that pancaked Siberia in 1908, and the assassination of JFK. It’s all bugs.
Think about it.
Insects the size of double-decker buses have levelled Tokyo alone several times since the Second World War, but we continue to turn a blind eye. Don’t be one of the duped.
Our soldiers aren’t fighting Taliban insurgents hiding out in the Afghan hills. They’re battling giant bugs like the swarm of hideous whatsits from Starship Troopers. The earthquake in Haiti? The subprime mortgage crisis? The Toronto Maple Leafs inability to make the playoffs? Members of the clergy fondling altar boys? Yes, all bugs.
Despite the overwhelming evidence, there are some who live in denial of the conspiracy that insects are telepathically communing over — messaging each other half a world away via those unsightly antennae. Plotting against us. Brainwashing the weak. Throttling download speeds on the Internet.
Denial? Perhaps, or these naysayers are in on it. I don’t know, but consider this:
Since 1984, a group of entomology grad students at the University of Illinois has been screening something they call the Insect Fear Film Festival, luring innocents into darkened rooms to watch movies featuring those very giant insects that are wreaking havoc on our planet.
They like to call themselves “cultural entomologists” and claim the festival isn’t a warning about the imminent takeover of our society by insects, but is instead a fun way to illustrate Hollywood’s misdirected bandwagonning on our common fear of bugs. To these goons it’s all a lark, like we should feel good about lathering ourselves with honey and laying on an anthill.
Sure.
Check this carefully worded propaganda lifted right from their website:
“Maybe it’s because insects remain the one familiar and conspicuous group which is politically correct to hate. Probably for this reason, Hollywood has shown no inclination to stop producing bad insect science fiction films either… we have an obligation to counter with the truth about insects.”
Their brand of “truth” is some touchy feely mantra about how we have it all wrong concerning bugs. They’re not here to enslave us and then eat us. They’re benign and cheerful. They all sing benign and cheerful songs. They’re all like Jiminy Cricket and wear hats and shoes with spats.
In 26 years, these cultural entomologists have spread their lies with nearly 100 films. This year’s offerings were The Fly and Tarantula, drawing crowds upwards of 500 people.
“We love insects and we love movies,” says Nils Cordes, speaking for the group. “It’s amazing to see how many people just want to learn and talk about bugs.”
Talk about how troubling they are and how afraid of them we are, maybe.
What’s clear from our film treatment of the insect world is this: do not trust a bug. They are likely some sort of alien sent on a destructive mission to rape and pillage this planet.
“Kids love touching live insects,” says Cordes, who was probably laughing when he said it. But he didn’t. He wrote it. After I asked him how audiences at his Insect Fear Film Festival react. And I’ll bet he was having one hell of a good chuckle thinking that he was putting one over on me.
So I hunted down a second opinion.
Carol Maier is an entomologist who runs the Victoria Bug Zoo, literally a small, indoor zoo in the heart of downtown Victoria, British Columbia where patrons can freely observe and fondle regulation-sized insects. The Bug Zoo is probably radiation free, which is why the bugs have remained tiny. But it’s still a place to cop a feel of a glow-in-the-dark scorpion, a three-inch long Madagascar hissing cockroach, or a 400-leg millipede as long as your forearm.
Maier suggests there’s cultural and historical prejudice at work in Hollywood that plays up the freakish nature of bugs.
“We’re just afraid of anything we don’t know about. Historically, bugs were blamed for a lot of things, like disease and mental illness.”
Entrenched fear, she says, is a learned thing and the only way to overcome insectophobia is to want to overcome it.
Before she opened the zoo, Maier used to keep insects at home. When visitors came over they’d recoil and go “eeeeew” and do a little tippy-toed dance of fear that made it look like they were dancing barefoot on hot coals. OK, I added that last part because that’s what I’d do.
Then I’d kill them, I boldly announce, a sentiment that does not sit well with Maier.
“It’s easy for people to kill them because they don’t relate to them,” she tells me. Then she says something that makes me squirm like I’ve just watched a silverfish race across my bare toes.
“Everything has a right to life. There’s no reason to go out and kill things just because we fear them or don’t know anything about them.”
Tell that to the Golden Retriever-sized wasps in Keith Roberts excellent novel The Furies. Tell that to Jeff Goldblum as he teleports into the Brundle-fly. Tell that to Kafka’s Gregor Samsa when he wakes up one morning to find himself transformed into a cockroach.
We should make it our mission to destroy all bugs.
Don’t listen to what entomologists and environmentalists say about beneficial bugs. That’s crap! They’re all evil. Just look at them. Look at their hideous compound eyes, jittery mandibles, probing antennae, and see-through wings. Some even have hair. And moths… they’re made of dust. Every time you swat one that’s bouncing off a light bulb it leaves a smudge of dust. That’s not real.
The vilification of insects — all 850,000 species of them — isn’t some new trend like Twitter, Octomom, owning a puggle, or the umpteenth return of the Ray-Ban Wayfarer. We’ve always hated them. Partly because they look strange.
“To us as humans and as mammals,” explains Cordes, “they have the wrong number of legs, have eyes that look wrong, and have weird things sticking out of their head. And there are a ton of them. You almost never have one ant or one termite or one house fly.”
And, he notes, ever since humans began stockpiling food and creating warm shelter, insects have wanted to be our roommates.
“Antagonistic relationships with insects are almost a given.”
And yet, simultaneously, we extol their mysterious virtues.
The ancient Egyptians revered dung beetles as divine. For millennia, the Chinese have keep crickets as pets because they like the chirping sound. The Nazca people of Peru carved enormous geoglyphs of bugs into the arid, desert ground. John Belushi dressed up in a bee suit on Saturday Night Live.
Fly-fishermen pay bugs the ultimate homage. They tie almost perfect replicas of them. Little statues — icons of the insect that will bob and weave just like the real thing and attract the gaping mouths of fish.
That’s just plain wrong. Use a worm. Enough of Robert Redford waving a rod around like he’s conducting a symphony. Put the damn thing in the water and wait. That’s what fishing is supposed to be about — attrition. Who can wait longer, fish or fisher? That’s what beer is for.
Bugs are for dipping in bottles of formaldehyde and for frightening girls — or frightening fishermen who think those bottles might contain beer.
Most peculiar in our fascination of bugs is our repulsion toward some insects and our attraction to others.
Take, for example, the ladybug.
Tiny, perfect, smooth, and polka dotted like an $1,100 Miu Miu shoulder bag, the ladybug is classified as a “good bug” bug. When one lands on our sleeve there’s no rush to brush it away like it was a praying mantis. It can sit there while we “oooh” and “ahhh” as though it were a newborn baby.
But, hey, take a close look at one. Aaaaaaaah! They’re horrible. They’re like any other bug. Horrifyingly bug-like.
Dragonflies are also deemed to be one of the good bugs because they each eat a bushel of mosquitoes every day, are harmlessly curious about humans, and hover about like helicopters with giant eyes. But just get one caught down the back of your shirt and it’s freak-out time.
Grasshoppers make the short list for good bugs because they chirp pleasingly and allow themselves to be dissected in Grade 7 science class. But if you live in the country and have to listen to them you’re awake all night because of that damn chirping.
The bee is considered another good bug. They give us honey, pollinate flowers, are regularly anthropomorphized by Disney animators, and are voiced by Jerry Seinfeld. However, let’s not forget their low tolerance for being prodded by rolled-up newspapers and having their hives vandalized by homemade flame-throwers.
Bad bugs are more obvious: cockroaches, ants, mosquitoes, wasps, fleas, ticks… and all disease. (Germs are just really small insects and that’s why we call an infection a “bug”.)
In the middle are people like Maier and Cordes who try to suck the rest of us in about how great bugs are and how it’s actually all right to touch them.
Butterfly World is a good example. Step into an overheated greenhouse and let thousands of flittering butterflies land on you. Gross! And if that’s such a cute idea, why isn’t there any Moth World, Termite World, or Dung Beetle World?
After the apocalypse, we’ve been repeatedly warned — after the nuclear war when unlimited radiation is unleashed and bugs morph into dinosaur-sized monsters — this dusty orb will literally become Cockroach World.
As the great explorer and ecologist Jacques-Yves Cousteau said, “If we go on the way we have, the fault is our greed and if we are not willing to change, we will disappear from the face of the globe, to be replaced by the insect.”
You’ve been warned. Now, quickly, step on that cockroach.
Photo Credits
“Jiminy Cricket” © Disney
What a funny and intelligent writer you are. Cool topic.