By Geoff Olson

You never step in the same river twice," said the Greek philosopher Heraclitus, remarking on the flow of time and the primacy of change.

Transformation is inseparable from life, as any nature-watcher knows. Over a period of years, I observed this first-hand at a relative’s island property in Washington State, where birds, rodents, deer and insects came and went. The most fascinating, and most human in their social aspect, were the societies of ants that lived around the house.

No one, including exterminators, could convince the critters that the property didn’t belong to them. Long before the arrival of the human invaders, thousands of generations of ants had lived industriously, with their mound-building efforts transcending their individual lives as much as cathedral projects transcended the lives of Renaissance Europeans.

The industrious little fellows have a history of protecting their monarch automatically and without coercion, just as human soldiers do. Edward O. Wilson, the world’s foremost expert on Hymenoptera - the family of insects that includes ants - sums up their foreign policy as "restless aggression, territorial conquest and genocidal annihilation of neighbouring colonies, wherever possible."

If they had weapons of mass destruction, Wilson notes, ants would probably end the world in a week. Perhaps we are more like them than we’d like to think; in the collective are human beings any less on autopilot than the fellows at our feet?

With this is in mind, permit me tell you the strange tale of an insect, the giant forest ant - Camponotus gigas to be precise - found in the rainforests of Malaysia. This insect spends its life foraging on the dense undergrowth, unless it is unfortunate enough to breathe in a spore from a species of Cordyceptus fungus.

Once in the ant’s trachea, the spore makes its way to the ant’s brain, where it begins to grow. (The mycelia avoid the vital organs so that the host does not die immediately but continues to provide nourishment to the growing fungus.)

The ant’s behaviour begins to change, as if it’s been reprogrammed. For the first time in its life, it leaves the forest floor to clamber up a nearby tree. When it gets to the highest point, the ant freezes into position on a twig or leaf, sinks in its mandibles, and dies.

The fungus devours the rest of the ant’s brain, and when the brain is consumed, it moves on to the soft tissues inside the exoskeleton. Within a few weeks, a spiky projection grows from the ant’s head, at the end of which develops a mushroom cap. More caps may develop from spikes growing through the insect’s exoskeleton. They eventually burst, releasing tiny capsules into the air.

Writes a biologist for the journal Nature Malaysiana: "These capsules in turn explode as they float downwards, spraying spores over the surrounding area and infecting unwary and unlucky insects passing through when this happens. The life cycle of the fungus is thus completed."

Well, human beings may not be THAT much like ants, but this weird little vignette may offer a fairly good analogy for the change of behaviour in North America over the past 20 years.

It’s as if we collectively inhaled spores of some kind, which commandeered our nervous systems and marched us off in directions we wouldn’t normally go. The spores were ideas: free trade, privatization, wealth through Wall Street, unregulated movement of electronic capital, corporate mega mergers, the "Washington consensus." All were very good things, we were told.

For those who listened to talk radio, and read the tabloid papers, the spores came in simple varieties. Government is bad. Taxes are bad. Business is good.

Members of the elite - bankers, money managers and policy wonks - were the spore carriers. In short order they infected politicians, public relations flacks and the opinion shapers in the media. Together, these spore heads managed to convince most of the worker ants that their interests were one and the same with those of the elite - the fungal sources of power, with their mycelial networks of capital.

Some of us refused to be good little ants and join in on this two - decade march, but we were swept along anyway. The spore heads had decided for us; it was time to get with the program and abandon the boring old plane of the welfare state. It was time to climb ever upward into the dizzying heights of self advancement.

The program was largely a success, for the fungus that is. It’s one of those ironies of history that blue-collar workers - the ants, if you will - are among those who to this day most strongly defend big business, less government and all the community-gutting legislative reversals that have done so much damage to the average family’s income, job security, and leisure time over the past 20 years.

Hence the mid-’90s phenomenon in the US of what Rush Limbaugh called his "ditto heads." Writes Thomas Frank in his book One Market Under God: "Backing it all up was the much-discussed radio uprising of the early ‘90s, which looked enough like a non-staged popular movement to make it all seem plausible. On the commercially undesirable AM frequencies, average people in vast numbers were tuning in to hear angry commentators flay the liberal elite. What’s more, these listeners were themselves participating in the flaying, phoning in to voice their own anger at the bureaucratic know-it-alls, the tax-and-spenders, the politically correct, the Marxist professors, the beneficiaries of affirmative action, the welfare queens."

What Frank doesn’t address is that the anger wasn’t entirely without foundation. Gender and identity politics reduced much of the left to prim school marms during the ‘90s, arguing over who gets to call who what. The left has a lot to answer for, including the long abdication of its traditional focus on the real sources of money, class and power. (No Logo author Naomi Klein once told me she believed the campus fixation on gender issues helped allow corporate interests to waltz into academia unchallenged.)

The legions of worker-ants tired of the precious language games of the left, so they were especially vulnerable to the spores from the right. The Clinton presidency was infected, carrying on the Reagan/Bush agenda of gutting social programs and environmental legislation. In Canada, Chretien succeeded so well in this department that he was complemented by former prime minister Brian Mulroney for "going further with our policies than we ever did."

The federal reversal of Trudeau’s legacy was achieved largely through the deficit scare, by using it to undercut social programs (which weren’t the true source of the deficit, according to Stats Canada officials), and convincing Canadians that our much-needed belt-tightening segued naturally into putting the nanny state in a noose.

Under the watch of finance minister Paul Martin, Canadians experienced major cuts to federal transfer payments to the provinces, and the elimination of the Canada Assistance Plan, which determined the minimal provincial standards for the use of such funds for health and welfare programs.

All of this went over poorly with many Canadians who were seemingly spore resistant. They rejected Canada’s devolution into a complete laissez-faire state, under a US model. Canadians have low tolerance for smoke blown up our butts, and spores up our noses. And the resistance appears to be growing. Worker ants north of the 49th may have sunk their mandibles into the money tree, but it’s the spores in their heads that are disintegrating, not them.

Still, the US-based fungal networks of CNN, Fox News and other media outlets keep at it, spewing out new, more infectious spores, while re-releasing the old ones. "The war on terror." "Weapons of mass destruction." "Liberation." "Free-dom." "Democracy." These little bits of behaviour-modifying elite-speak aren’t just dangerous to our own interests; they are deadly for much of the rest of the world. In a fungal trance, many of us don’t even notice that some of these words have turned into their very opposites.

What would an alien race think of this strange perversion of our thinking behaviour? It’s easy to imagine that extraterrestrials might regard the human species as little more than glorified ants, programmed to invade neighbouring territories and grabbing all the available resources. Homo sapiens technologicus doesn’t operate according to pheromones per se - but the smell of oil does seem to drive us nuts.

Biologist Edward O. Wilson estimates we are dispatching 70 species a day down the memory hole. Ironically, the biggest game we are likely to bag with resource-rape is ourselves. Without a reversal in our global warming-and-warring behaviour, driven by capital, we will foul the nest past the point of no return, making it unlivable for most of our own. Of course, we all know that. We’ve known it for years - but we seem unable collectively to redirect our march away from the brink.

Needless to say, humans aren’t ants, and we have a choice. We can climb further away from a state of equilibrium, driven by something alien inside us, hoping that it has our best interests in mind. Or we can choose to resist the programming and wake up, before the life we once knew is consumed for good.

Geoff Olson is a Vancouver writer and political cartoonist. He can be reached at gefo@telus.net





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