Coffee at hand, bagel a’cookin’. Tom Waits singing Downtown Train as I imagine it’s actually our good friend the Cookie Monster singing his heart out to some blue-furred gal who’s captured his heart and for the briefest of moments and for the first time in his life, Ol’ Cook’s turned his whole being from his all-occupying obsession with dessert foods. Yes, that’s a little weird. But good for Cookie, to be thinking rather of nookie, the far better and healthier sugar.
Fuck it, things are happening, the Status Quo is officially uncool. Turns out the honeybee is the new canary in the mineshaft, this based on the inescapable fact that honeybees are disappearing and disappearing drastically in the West. Now, can I say it’s because of Global Warming? I can’t. I don’t know it, not for certain and I’ll tell you why: nobody, anywhere knows for certain why the little fuckers are disappearing but disappear they do anyways. There was an article in the NYTimes and CNN carried it for about three minutes before switching to two full hours of analysis about Britney Lohan driving drunk and Paris Spears chuggin' dick, which is impressive, given how much airtime the 'Most Trusted Name in News' normally gives environmental concerns. Theory I like the best right now is that the huge increase in cell-phone use means the air is far more electromagnetically polluted which fucks with the poor little critter’s homing system, that they never find their queen again and they die alone, their poor little honeybee hearts busted to smithereens.
I know what you’re all saying; "Honeybees are critters and not humans so why give a fuck?" Which is a decent question and I’ll labor to answer it. Turns out in human terms it’s billions of dollars for the honeybees to have fucked off like they did and that’s when we all care about critters for a little while. Because Industry gets fucked by it (to the tune of about 14 billion last year, if I recall properly) and that filters right down to every one of us little cogs/consumers that keep the great and glorious machine a pumpin’ and a belchin.’ Of course honeybees are a part of the complex ecosystem in which we, for all our Greatness and Sagacity, find ourselves right smack dab in the middle of, and any transformation that occurs to said complex ecosystem has RealWorld ramifications to us important Humans.
14 billion dollars lost and that’s just this year. Will the rest of them disappear next year? Don’t know? Take heart. Neither do I or anybody else, Great and Sagacious though we all no doubt be. Some magnate in the honey biz once made the statement that every third bite of food you’ve ever eaten in your life is owed to the honeybee, so chew on that over your morning bagel or cookie as you watch a very close game between the Chargers and the Colts on their way to a soul-crushing defeat at the hand of the perfect Patriots or watch the latest political hack debate the other latest political hack and ask yourself what does it mean?
What it means is that Green is coming and there’s not a damned thing anyone of us can do to stop it. Because when the honeybees start disappearing and it starts costing Big Business some big clink, that’s when we can’t afford to bury our heads in the sand and create false debate where there is none. It means we better pick up our socks, figure out precisely what the fuck is happening and what the fuck we can do about it. Far Right blowhards like to make all these claims about how damaging it would be to the Economy to do anything whatsoever to fight what I’ve taken to calling Human Climate Abuse or even reign in industrial pollution in any way shape or form but the essential irony of it all, that the Honeybees have quietly but firmly proven, is that it is in fact that same Economy that will force us all to respect and save the environment. One hopes it won’t be too late, if it isn’t already.
"Remember the Honeybee!" might be an odd rallying cry but there you have it. Do with it what you will.
Happy Sunday. Go Giants. That is all.
-iSC
