Of Ants, Grasshoppers ... and Payback (20 Feb. 2013)

            When I was a child, people still read Aesop's fables, and I grew up on, among other stories, "The Ant and the Grasshopper." Except I grew up on a somewhat Disneyfied version.

            The story goes that one warm summer's day a Grasshopper was hopping about a field playing his song — or her song, if you're telling the story in a Romance language where both "Grasshopper" and "Ant" are feminine nouns — but as I heard it in American English it was his song, and the grasshopper was playing a fiddle and having a fine old time. Anyway, Ant comes along dragging an ear of corn, and the grasshopper asks the ant why she's working so hard, and Ant says she's laying in food for the winter and advises Grasshopper to do the same. Grasshopper points out that the weather is still beautiful and goes about playing, while the ant gets back to work.

            Winter comes and the grasshopper finds himself starving and crawls up to the ant hill and sees the ants eating heartily of the food they stored up, leading to the MORAL: "It is best to prepare for the days of necessity."

            Okay, but between the set-up and the MORAL, there's a climax to the story. In the version I heard as a kid, the grasshopper begs the ants for food, and they invite him in and feed him and let him join their winter party, and he learns his lesson. In the original, the ants let the grasshopper starve (although hyperthermia probably killed him sooner).

             I only recently learned the original version, however, and between childhood and my current old age I worked my butt off in school and went on to teach and got to observe a fair number of rich, spoiled, and energetic-at-play (only) figurative "grasshoppers" among my fellow students, and then just my students. I lived thirty-five years in a college student neighborhood in Oxford, Ohio, and around the corner from a consolidated high school, and, in some rare moments, I got a bit bitter. So now and then I retold the story.

            Same buildup in my version, but when Grasshopper begs for food the ant queen invites him in — and looses on him her hit squad of ichneumon wasps, who paralyze him with their stings, inject their eggs, and the hardworking ants and wasps together feed on the grasshopper for a joyous winter.

            MORAL: "Payback is a motherf*#%er!"

            But that story is bitter and overstated and, if you know about ichneumon wasps, a little bordering upon cruelty and the grotesque.

            So I'll switch to a more upbeat story, from the prime of my life, when I was in grad school at the University of Illinois and living in Champaign, IL, sharing an apartment with two other graduate students in what had pretty well been a grad-student enclave.

            We three graduate-student ants worked our jobs and taught and studied and had a good first semester. And then, mid-year, the new neighbors arrived. Undergrads. Undergrads who'd been residents of the dorms; they were, as my more bigoted roommate called them, still basically "Dorm Rats" or, more neutrally, "Dormies." Dormies in their first apartment. Right downstairs of us. Dormies who left with us at the end of the school year the two traffic signs they'd stolen. One was a stop sign, and the other, for a nice touch, was a caution sign showing silhouette-children playing or trying to cross the street.

            The new neighbors were definitely Grasshopper-ish: playing their music, loudly, and singing drunken songs, badly, and having a fine old time in that last term before graduation.

            (The Dormie-hater got a bumper sticker for his car warning, "I DON'T BRAKE FOR UNDERGRADUATES.")

            And then final exam week approached — three-hour finals were standard at the U of IL, essay exams and problem-solving ("Show your work!") in the more respectable programs — and our ex-dormies got quietly desperate as they crammed for their finals.

            We were grad students. We'd worked hard all year and had completed the work in the courses we were taking. We taught courses where you could assign a final paper and have a lot to do the last week of school, but then we were finished.

            So we threw a party toward the end of the last week of classes. And we invited all the neighbors (except the grasshopper crew downstairs), and our guests invited friends, and a couple guys showed up with enough dope to share — dopers in that time and place still remembered their manners — and some ATO's arrived about midnight from hell-'n'-gone in Urbana with cases of beer on their shoulders, saying "We heard you were throwing a party." And the cops arrived about 2 a.m. and said it was without doubt the best party they'd been called to break up at least that month and stuck around until their next call (finally exiting by stepping over the passed-out body of our major dealer).

            And the party went on until we hosts just went to bed, knowing we'd brought happiness to a lot of people — way more people than the fire inspector would've been happy with — and proud to have impressed such connoisseurs of inebriated brawls as the Tau's and the Champaign cops.

            Our neighbors, so we guessed, passed their exams and didn't flunk out of school, got drafted, and sent to Vietnam to die. Anyway, they left us their signs to dispose of, which was recognition of our competence if not exactly a totally unambiguous gift. (My roommates dropped the signs off at a police station very early one morning: on the lawn to be precise, and leaving the scene at a goodly pace.)


            We figured there were no hard feelings from the aging boys downstairs; and we all learned something. Grasshopper in the fable learned, "It is best to prepare for the days of necessity"; as we grad students got confirmed in the belief "'Revenge is a dish best eaten cold,' with some cheap white wine to wash it down, passing a bong, and playing classic rock loud enough for a block party."

The Lion and the Mouse — and the Alligator (23 Jan. 2014)

"Do not insult the mother alligator until after you have crossed the river."

— Haitian Proverb I Like to Quote

            When I left Cornell U in Ithaca, NY, my friends gave me a copy of a book of classic insults, which had as its headnote what I have as mine above: "Do not insult the mother alligator until after you have crossed the river."
            I have not always followed this good advice, but at least in theory I would go further and advise against insulting even small alligators even when you're well beyond the river and are pretty sure you'll never see an alligator again. Yea, verily I would say unto you: If you can, make the alligator your friend.
            Three examples, two from the side of the human, and one from a small and figurative alligator's point of view.
            In my late teens, when I was a junior counselor or counselor at a summer camp, teaching archery, a father visiting "my" archery range nocked an arrow and drew a bow while facing away from the targets. We didn't have the term "zero tolerance" back then, and I wouldn't have liked the idea — I definitely don't like it now — but one should never, ever fuck around with weapons of any sort, so I told the aging juvenile to leave the range. I was later asked by a fellow counselor if I knew who the wise guy was. "Sewer Rat's father," I said, naming one of the less popular campers. "Uh huh," my colleague said, and left smiling cryptically.
            When the summer was over and I was back in the City, I read in the pre-Rupert-Murdoch Chicago Sun-Times that Sewer Rat's father had been found in the trunk of his Lincoln Continental with a couple bullets in his head: as we used to say at that time in Chicago, "an obvious suicide."
            On a later occasion, when I was a college junior or senior and a fraternity officer, I called the home of a pledge to remind him he was to come back from vacation a couple days early to help get the house ready for mid-year Rush.
            While we were mopping floors, or whatever, a fraternity brother of mine noted that the pledge in question had been dropped off by his father, who seemed somewhat pissed off at the house generally and, perhaps, me in particular. No big deal, but … "You were polite and respectful, right?" Of course I had been, but firm; I had other calls to make, and if I had to cut my vacation short a couple days, so could a freshman who would've been flunking out of school at a neighborhood animal house if I hadn't gone along with getting him depledged there and over to us in an arcane maneuver arranged by our Rush Chairman and agreed to by the other house with rapidity and graciousness that I should have thought more about.
            "You were polite and respectful right?" "Yeah. Why is this significant?" Did I know what the pledge's father did for a living? I did not. "Contract work," I was told. Maybe a couple contracts a year, and they lived on that, lived very, very well. When this Dad visited again, I didn't make a big deal out of it, but I did show, briefly, unostentatiously just how respectful I could be.
            Nice thing growing up in Chicago when I did: You learned the wisdom of manners if for no other reason than you could never be sure with whom you were dealing and if and how that person might be, as they said, "connected."
            An armed society probably isn't a polite society, certainly not in Chicago, but it can reduce young males' tendencies toward incivility if Ms. Manners might be a representative from the local B'nai Mafia chapter and advise respect while carrying a tire iron.
            My story from the other side, so to speak, is from the subtler world of scholarship. Long ago, I wrote a couple articles dealing with (among other things) Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth's fine but underrated and under-read 1955 novel, Gladiator-at-Law. My writing went unnoticed for years, and then I came across an article by a young scholar that not only cited my work but (unnecessarily for the citation) commented on it briefly, but at sufficient length to suggest that it — my work on this novel, my whole rather old-fashioned approach, actually — sucked.
            Okay, I finally get a citation, and a bit of a comment to boot, and it's insulting. Like the guy could have just had the citation, or said that I took an approach different from his and one he thought less useful, but, nah, he had to say something harsh.
            A couple more years pass, and I get a note from the guy who cited me saying, more or less, Hi, hey, what a coincidence, the Chair of his department —let's call him Rick — was a friend of mine from grad school and Rick said that the young scholar should write me. The guy needed an outside evaluation of his scholarship, which he hadn't had time to write much of, so his Gladiator-at-Law piece was going to be important for him to get tenure, and I was one of the few other people to write on the novel at the time and Rick said that I'd write a carefully composed and effective letter for him because I was a nice guy and a responsible scholar and would always give an honest evaluation and all the young scholar had to do was ask me politely and grovel, just a bit. He groveled; I wrote. The punk got tenure.
            "Keep your words soft and sweet," mostly — to modify somewhat a quotation attributed to Andy Rooney — "just in case you have to eat them.” But we should go even farther than avoiding giving offense. And here I'll paste in a fable out of Aesop that I learned as a child and — since I read it in a Latin version in college, not because it was around in my childhood — I'm sure is out of copyright.

A Lion asleep in his lair was waked up by a Mouse running over his face. Losing his temper he seized it with his paw and was about to kill it. The Mouse, terrified, piteously entreated him to spare its life. "Please let me go," it cried, "and one day I will repay you for your kindness." The idea of so insignificant a creature ever being able to do anything for him amused the Lion so much that he laughed aloud, and good-humouredly let it go. But the Mouse's chance came, after all. One day the Lion got entangled in a net which had been spread for game by some hunters, and the Mouse heard and recognised his roars of anger and ran to the spot. Without more ado it set to work to gnaw the ropes with its teeth, and succeeded before long in setting the Lion free. "There!" said the Mouse, "you laughed at me when I promised I would repay you: but now you see, even a Mouse can help a Lion."

Beyond the cynical advice on waiting to insult alligators, beyond the obvious prudence of not insulting Mafia accountants or free-lance hit men — or anyone just casually — "The Lion and the Mouse" teaches the more positive but equally practical lesson of being nice to others whenever we can. As the tough-minded among the Anarchists and communitarians argued, we practice mutual aid in part because it is right to do so and because it feels good to do so: but that good feeling comes from a reliable sense of superiority as well as more admirable altruism; also, however, we practice mutual aid and should be nice to one another because the one sure thing in life is that we will eventually get into trouble.



            So, MORAL: do not insult even small alligators and help when you can. If nothing else, you never know when you'll need a favor, or from whom.