LGBT

Mother Jones wrote a great piece, “A Political history of the Cicadas” on the pending cycle of Cicadas, the annoying, noisy but harmless little bugs that have an unusual 17 year life cycle.  Some people mistakenly confuse them with the destructive plagues of locusts, which can do devastating damage; they’re nothing like that, except for also occurring in  large numbers.

What caught my attention mid-way through the piece were these two paragraphs:

…”The government experts assure us that the cicada is not as dangerous or as devastating as he sounds,” a Gazette Times story from July 1923—titled “The Periodical Cicada, Naturalists Alarmed”—read. In the 1930s, government experts also reassured concerned citizens regarding cicada “locusts.” Even in the Reagan era, the government issued an official public pamphlet on the subject of cicadas. The government’s care-free attitude persists today: “The Obama administration currently has no plan to suppress the ‘cicada invasion,’” an administration official tells me. (Partly because, as off-putting as they sound and appear, cicadas are good for plants and the affected environment.)

In 2004, the harmlessness and notoriety of the cicada prompted Brandon Breeden, head writer of the website Cicadaville.com, to spread satirical rumors about how cicadas are “vicious killers seething with deadly venom,” and how “children are [cicadas'] primary source of nutrition.” As a result, Breeden received emails thanking him “for the truth about cicadas the government’s been keeping secret.”

(Cicadaville.com has since been converted into a Japanese website about STDs.)

It is both tragic and hysterically funny that there are conspiracy theorists, then and now, that believe the government is hiding from the public necessary information about great swarms of insects coming to take away your children. (Presumably this would be a variation on the scarab beetles in the turn of the century Brendan Fraser Mummy movie sci-fi fantasies.)  The only thing lacking is a companion conspiracy that either 1. you need guns to defend yourself and your family against the swarms of locusts; 2. the locusts are an Obama administration conspiracy to come take your guns/ render your guns useless; or 3. the locusts will turn your children into mindless zombies, who will be turned over to New World Order FEMA camps, (with the smarter ones being shipped off to the bug-proof frozen fortresses of the Illuminati).

I’m just going to sit back and laugh at the crazy conspiracy nuts on the right, and maybe cruise by the food channel to see if anyone is showing off how to cook the little buggers, er, bugs, in some exotic healthy snack they’re good for you kind of way.  I don’t want to eat cicadas myself, no matter how they might be batter deep fried or covered in chocolate on a stick. But it’s fun to watch other people besides conservatives running around with their hair on fire – but secretly enjoying their own emotions while they do it.

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