Tyrannosaur Hunting

"All right," Travis continued, "say we accidentally kill one mouse here. That means all the future families of this one particular mouse are destroyed, right?"
"Right."
"And all the families of the families of that one mouse! With a stamp of your foot, you annihilate first one, then a dozen, then a thousand, a million, a billion possible mice"
"So they're dead," said Eckels. "So what?"
"So what?" Travis snorted quietly. "Well, what about the foxes that'll need those mice to survive? For want of ten mice, a fox dies. For want of ten foxes, a lion starves. For want of a lion, all manner of insects, vultures, infinite billions of life forms are thrown into chaos and destruction. Eventually it all boils down to this: fifty-nine million years later, a cave man, one of a dozen on the entire world, goes hunting wild boar or saber-tooth tiger for food. But you, friend, have stepped on all the tigers in that region. By stepping on one single mouse. So the cave man starves. And the cave man, please note, is not just any expendable man, no! He is an entire future nation. From his loins would have sprung ten sons. From their loins one hundred sons, and thus onward to a civilization. Destroy this one man, and you destroy a race, a people, an entire history of life."

Ray Bradbury - A Sound of Thunder


A Sound of Thunder became particularly apt to American politics two years ago, prompting some to wonder what idiot went back in time to step on the wrong butterfly and hand a Twitter addict the nuclear launch codes. Ray Bradbury would have been perhaps more aware than most of his tenuous existential link to historical causality. In 1692, a 77-year-old woman named Mary Bradbury was sentenced to death as a witch in Salem, Massachusetts. Thanks to holding a respectable social rank and to a plethora of character witnesses her hanging was deferred until the hullabaloo died down and pardons handed out. Having raised 11 children to adulthood it might be said she'd already passed natural selection's test. Maybe her hanging would not have impacted her progeny's success anyway. Then again, if it had happened fifty years earlier... It does make one wonder at the idiotic dice rolls our ancestors must have won, down to our methanogenic or sulfur-reducing unicellular primogenitor almost four billion years ago.

On the other hand we owe our existence as much to the dead as we do to the living. What of the dead witches at Salem? Which of their grandchildren might have out-bid Mary's grandkids on a plot of land, might have mugged them in back alleys, might have wooed their mates away or planted a musket-ball or bayonet between their eyes in the Revolutionary or Civil wars? For want of a dead fox, the wrong mice survive and empty a granary, and there goes Fahrenheit 451, there go The Martian Chronicles, there goes The October Country right out the window and into the empty walks at night, lost in the rain. Aren't we glad the right witches hanged?

Sss-snap!

I've never looked up my own genealogy. Good luck tracing a bunch of dirt-farming peasants through century after century of invasions, riots and illiteracy. It's as likely as not to include ancient Celts and slightly less ancient Tartars, Semites and anti-Semites, Goths in 31 flavors, gypsies and crusaders, a smidge of Romans and a dash of Scythians, various Turkic denominations including Ottoman... and hell, let's admit it, probably an indecorous quantity of Neanderthal. They left behind runes and mosaics, walls and bracelets, monasteries and swords, all the usual marvelous effluvium of airy nothing given a local habitation and a name. Half of them killed the other half while still pregnant with their children. Their cultural practices included at various times human sacrifices, torture, cannibalism, torture, slavery and did I mention the torture? To be honest, I'm pretty glad most of those butterflies got stomped. Good riddens to bad lepidoptera, no matter how pretty their wings look in certain lights.

It is now past midnight. Somewhere outside my window here in the sarcastically lovely town of [redacted] you've all just finished celebrating Halloween, called by the pedantic Samhain (pronounced so-vain) and if your ancestors saw you at it they'd probably skin you alive for your innumerable transgressions against this-and-that custom, deity or seating arrangement. At thirty-five I've already lived to see old customs die out. Some were centuries old, others not so much. Not shedding many tears over the demise of such rituals as rickrolling or Chuck Norris jokes. I think I'd miss Halloween, though. Harvest festivals permeate every culture that's invented agriculture, but we've already moved on to plastic pumpkins and LEDs. How much longer before the agronomic link is cut altogether? I think most of us already miss Halloween and those still celebrating are merely involved in an overly-raucous Irish wake for a relative whose face they don't even remember.

Petroleum killed the honeybee star. I realized earlier today that I miss the smell of candles. Candles and pumpkin guts, but mostly the candles. Nostalgia takes odd forms. I've lived to see unleavened pastries baked in a clay oven and clothes dried on lines strung like flapping wings piled ten stories tall over an entire cityscape. The electricity used to go out a lot, so we still kept wax candles around the house, unscented cheap brittle things, as backup. The electricity never goes out more than a tablet battery's worth of time these days. With an in-unit washer/dryer combo and an electric stove, I'm denied the sound of flapping laundry and my childhood memory of the blue flicker of a gas range as well. On the other hand I also remember being hit on the palm with a ruler (despite being a teacher's pet) just to make double sure I knew my place. So, fuck it. What witch do I have to hang to get an electric car to go with my electric writing, washing and cooking?

I will leave no posterity. Werewolves, unnatural creatures like witches, often fail the test of natural selection. I may still step on butterflies, though. Seems to be a popular pastime, as much now as in 1692. Witch-hunters professional and amateur alike are busily tossing blood libels left-wing and right-wing. Youtube is awash with paroxysmal displays of emotional fits brought on by (we are told) the transgression of some taboo by those who most assuredly deserve, if not a hanging, at the very least a blacklisting. And everyone, absolutely everyone, is sure they're the ones who are coming under attack by some new nebulous threat. It's a war on Christmas, a war on women, a war on gun rights, a war on frappuccinos, a war on marriage, a war on gay marriage. At least relatively few people are dying in these wars. Maybe, 300 years ago, somebody hanged the right witches, stomped the right butterflies.

We travel through time constantly. We can't help it. We're on rails, moving forward whether we like it or not. We keep running over some butterflies, collecting others. You, with the rental store gorilla suits and the sexy pirate wench costumes, what are you clinging to? Samhain was the fevre dream of minds stunted by famine, fear and superstition, who honestly believed that ghosts would gobble them right up if they didn't make scary faces. How many other holidays existed, among the myriad ancestors whose genetic material you've inherited? All your Maasai and Berber ancestors and your Viking ones, your Persian silk traders and your catamaran-sailing Pacific islanders and your Andean herders and yurt-dwelling Siberian nomads, of which you've never even heard and for which you hold no nostalgia. Consider what you've gotten by surrendering your emotional ties to them, by allowing them to take their rightful place in history as history. If we surrender Halloween, what fragile thing with feathers might be nourished in its place and take root, and grow into an entire new history of life?

And of all antiquated customs, why is the ritual of the witch hunt the one you still cling to, even into the internet age? Why do you still nourish that plague of locusts?