Upon the Killing of Small Things

Just a brief update to remind you that, even though the Swill has been mostly paralyzed for the past month, we're not technically dead.

Our silence could be attributed to a number of factors -- indolence, aphasia, boredom, reticence, frenetic attempts to accomplish something other than the refinishing of hardwood floors -- but in the end just know that our silence results from Having and Having-Not: Having too much to do and Having-Not Access to a computer during the late-night hours when we are wont to enjoy an ice-cold bottle of Miller High Life and share our thoughts with you, Our Friends.

Until our Fortress of Multitude is complete, we thought we owed you at the very least a friendly wave hello. We thought this as we were in the backyard, once again revelling in our ever responsible stewardship of the earth, unlike the lazy fucks who pat themselves on the back for not driving an SUV but can't be bothered to hang their laundry out to dry.

As we whipped clothespins about with alarming dexterity, we noticed a trio of baby robins in the grass, all of them swarmed by wasps, flies and ants. Two of the birds were doornails, wasps emerging from their eye cavities, food for worms and thought, etc. One of them, however, was yet flopping about, attempting to drag itself on demi-feathered wings away from what must have been a less than enjoyable way to go. We therefore did the most sympathetic thing we could, and smashed the head of said bird with our 16-oz. ripclaw hammer.

We were placidly unperturbed by our coup-de-grace, and this was not the first time we've intentionally and directly taken the life of a cute animal. There was a jackrabbit we accidentally paralyzed with a Willys Jeep in 1985, whose skull -- since we lacked a hammer or firearm -- we struck repeatedly against the trunk of a lodgepole pine. (Rabbits, by the way, sound disturbingly like screaming babies when they are in agony. Just so you know.) In the summer of 1986, the owner of a cattle ranch paid us twenty-five cents for every digger-squirrel tail we brought him; those cute little fuckers paid for our car insurance that year.

Oh, the guts of ducks, doves, and deers we have known!

The point is that we considered it a mercy killing; indeed, we fervently hope that if we're ever in the process of having our eyes eaten by wasps whilst dragging ourselves across a back yard, some kind soul will come along and smash our head with a ripclaw hammer. In short, we're not given to moral-allegorizing the smashing of skulls.

Since our bucolic laundry hanging was interrupted quite specifically by the smashing of a baby's skull, however, we thought we should probably check with the broader world to make sure that we weren't engaging in anything unethical, unlawful, or untoward. We recalled, after all, that 55% of the casualties in Lebanon are younger than fifteen, and though we don't even particularly like children -- ask anybody who knows us -- we're sticklers for legal and ethical conformity.

Who better to consult in these matters than a Professor of Law at Harvard University? Our attempts to get advice from this leading light of legal authority were sadly unproductive; turns out Dershowitz didn't have thing one to say about baby birds. He did assure us, however, that the smashing of skulls of Lebanese and Palestinian children isn't necessarily a bad thing. Finally, somebody looks at both sides of bombing civilian infrastructure and targeting civilians with U.S.-made weapons of mass destruction!

This we can use.

Before we feel totally comfortable with our skull smashing earlier today, however, we need to find out whether a baby robin should be considered as more or as less human than a Lebanese baby. Further, we'll need to investigate to discover whether this bird was sympathetic to the cause of those bigger birds who drop bigger turds on our car. If they were, well, I kind of wish I had put a bit more ire into and derived a bit more moral affirmation from my delivery of doom.

Our ethico-ontological calculator is currently offline, so it may be a few days before the final results are available.

ADDENDUM: The writer of this headline deserves a raise.