Saturday, April 19, 2003
 
Consume What You Harvest

In line at the hardware store with the artist formerly known as hli, I saw the most saddening thing I have seen in some time: a tennis racket that's electrically configured to zap bugs. Although the thing says it's not a toy, it's designed and packaged to be used as a tennis racket with insects as the ball, and their deaths as the result.

That's right, boys and girls, it's specifically a toy to kill insects. This is ohsovery wrong.

Swatting bugs inside the house or upon you when you're outside is necessity in preventing parasites from using you for lunch or preventing insects from consuming your grain. However, to simply go out of your way to kill them is kind of sick. They used to perjoratively say that a bad seed was the kind of kid to "pull the wings off of flies." Now some bunch of yippie skippy Ron Zapeils come along to make it fun for the whole family.

Some PETA gum flapper might come along and say it's just like huntung, but it's not. Responsible hunters consume what they harvest. I assume these wannabe bug batters are not. If they do, and they're putting moths, beetles, and bumblebees on the table for dinner, I don't have a problem with it. But you're not going to see Ted Nugent kill it and grill it (in one convenient step!) any time soon.

Fortunately, there's not been a craze or anything, which proves either we're in a recession and people cannot afford the finer things in life like a battery-operated taser-set-on-kill toy, or that America's not slid so far into irreverant decadence that mainstream people want to kill something anything, other than virtually through video games, for fun. When I get a warm fuzzy glow after a pitcher of margaritas, I can convince myself it's the latter.

- posted by Brian J. @ 8:57 PM
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