the Voice of Steely

[Craig Clark]

Sundry Pynchon-listers have written:
  > [...] The piece, called "Beetle Mania," (and co-authored 
  > by another kickass journalist, James Ridgeway) is all about the risk 
  > posed to American trees, already beset by fragility and decline, by 
  > some nasty little buggies in the Asian longhorn beetle family.  (The 
  > beetles have been hitching rides to the US in logs imported from 
  > overseas, in typical Byzantine business fashion, by American timber 
  > companies.) [...]
 
  > Just a sign of the times, all these Third World Threats to Global
  > Ecology invading everything! Everywhere you look, it's Asian beetles,
  > Asian milfoil, African killer bees, Mexican this and South American
  > that! One longs for the days when North America and Europe were net
  > exporters of pests to the rest of the world and scandinavian albino rats
  > ruled the earth! I think I'll have an orgasmic fit!
 
  > Don't forget water hyacinth, fahr aints (fire ants), nutria, etc.. from
  > South America... but we have introduced raccoons into Austria & the
  > Czech Republic..... ain't revenge suite?

Mebbe these critters are the Third World's revenge for World Bank and 
IMF "structural adjustment" policies, for the dumping of First World toxic 
wastes, and for the tremendous effort that the US puts into ensuring that 
Coca Cola penetrates to the most remote rural areas of the Third 
World (as opposed to the not-so-tremendous effort that the US puts 
into ensuring that potable water and primary health care penetrate to 
the most remote rural areas of the Third World) ... Oh, and did I 
forget to mention to colonialism?  Or support for anti-communist 
regimes that happen to be anti-human rights as well? And there's napalm 
and Agent Orange and the CIA shipping Nelson Mandela to the apartheid 
regime and ... oh, what the heck, I'm preaching to the converted here (I 
hope). Be grateful it's just a coupla beetles, foax.



Craig Clark

"Living inside the system is like driving across
 the countryside in a bus driven by a maniac bent
 on suicide."
   - Thomas Pynchon, "Gravity's Rainbow"