[Vision2020] The Tale of Ticks and Other Excess

[Art Deco]

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May 30, 2012
The Tale of Ticks and Other Excess By GAIL
COLLINS<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/gailcollins/index.html>

I cannot tell you what a relief it was when I discovered that the
multibillion-dollar trading loss at JPMorgan was because of deer.

Yes, I know. You thought it was the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act,
right? Me, too.

Then I read the recent Times article by Jessica Silver-Greenberg and Nelson
Schwartz that reported that Ina Drew, the executive who was in charge of
JPMorgan’s chief investment office, had been laid low by Lyme disease
during the period preceding the debacle.

Some of you who don’t live in the Northeast may not be familiar with Lyme
disease, but it can really knock you out. And it’s not always easy to
diagnose, so it can hang around until the symptoms get truly debilitating.
Believe me, if you have advanced Lyme disease, you are not going to be able
to keep a handle on a passel of frisky traders.

Lyme disease is transmitted by the bites of ticks, which are carried around
by deer. A typical victim might be a New Jersey resident who enjoys
gardening. Ina Drew lives in New Jersey and is an avid gardener — a hobby
that she’ll unfortunately be able to pursue full-time this season.

The deer. I think we really do have our villain.

There has been way too much combination of cataclysmic and incomprehensible
in our worry list lately. (See: euro.) So it’s a nice change of pace to be
able to put the blame for bad developments on simple-minded critters who
have no idea that there’s anything in the world outside their own need to
feed and reproduce. Like deer. Or ticks. Or Donald Trump.

We have now reached the point where the exurban deer population is so large
and so omnipresent that soon they’re going to start setting up trailer
camps. Paul Curtis, the extension wildlife specialist at Cornell
University, says that to get the tick population down to a reasonable
level, “you need deer densities of six to eight per square mile or less. In
the urban-rural fringes of many large metropolitan areas, it’s not unusual
to have densities of 100 to 200 per square mile.”

Really, whenever you get to the point where the main source of deer
fatalities is traffic collisions, you have way too many deer. Curtis says
Cornell has had great success with a program to sterilize the does, but it
costs about $1,000 per animal. I am going to go out on a limb and guess
that if Congress can’t bring itself to spring for an adequate number of
bank regulators, it’s not going to fork over that kind of money for deer
birth control.

Also, Curtis says it would help if hunters had to bag two females before
they’re allowed to shoot a stag. The problem with this is that hunters do
not like being told what to do, and nobody wants to offend them. These days
the whole gun thing is so volatile that even the most ardent
weapons-control advocates try to keep on the right side of the hunters,
just so you know they’re regular guys. (See: Senator Chuck Schumer holding
dead pheasant.)

I always thought the reason we had so much trouble controlling the deer
population was because deer have big eyes and adorable tails. But it turns
out that North Carolina is having a terrible problem with feral hogs, and
that can’t be because they’re cute.

The key here is the environment — global warming, suburban sprawl, wolf
depopulation, etc. But there’s also something about America that encourages
excess by every species. A Starbucks outlet is great — how can 12,000 not
be better? We are the land of the 26-week baseball season and 1,230
professional basketball games per year. Where it is not possible to have
one television show about bidding on abandoned storage lockers, extreme
fishing, misbehaving housewives or hog-hunting without having two, three,
four or seven. (How is it possible to have both an overpopulation of feral
hogs and an excess of reality TV shows about feral hog-hunters?)

Politically, we’ve always had eccentric/loony billionaires that
occasionally get involved in big campaigns, but this year we’ve spawned *
herds* of them, marching across the landscape, lowing about socialism and
leaving behind vast dumps of TV ads and old Newt Gingrich buttons. Dozens
and dozens of little Congressional candidates are attached to their hides,
waiting to jump off and start new Tea Party epidemics in the azaleas.

And Donald Trump! Trump has been around for years and years and years, and
his TV show, “Celebrity Apprentice,” served a useful function as a haven
for aging American Idols and retired professional wrestlers. For a long
time, nobody noticed that he had left his normal habitat and was wandering
around in people’s backyards, racing across the highway in the middle of
the night and eating all the day lilies.

Next thing you know, if you’re Mitt Romney, you wake up one morning to
headlines like: “Acquaintance of Donald Trump Wins Republican Presidential
Nomination.” You’ve been bit.


-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
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