Jonathan Kieran

When I was a little kid, maybe seven or eight, making “my own entertainment” (i.e. playing with sticks and plastic dinosaurs in the dirt) in the wilderness climes of upstate New York and Florida, it was occasionally fascinating to observe the Wonderful World of Bugs and their various doings. Ants, mantids, butterflies, beetles, you name it. All members of the creepy-crawly landscape could provide casual entertainment if one was patient or bored enough to sit around on a summer day and watch them go about their business without interfering.

The excitement factor really went up a notch, however, if you were lucky enough to happen upon two (or more) bugs engaged in some sort of battle against each other, e.g. a wasp trying to sting and drag away some languid, globulous caterpillar clinging to a leaf or perhaps a smallish spider in its web struggling to wrap-up an agitated, buzzing cicada.

Who would get the better of whom in such natural contests?

It was an idle curiosity that only a kid would pause to consider, given that adults were busy watching soap operas and pushing appliance buttons or making money at an office or drinking themselves into catatonia. Even then, as a spectator sport, “bug fights” were only interesting for a few minutes, at most, because flitting attentions spans were given to children by God for the purpose of moving on to the next outdoor mystery, skinned knee, opportunity for mischief, or game-to-be-played atop some rock-pile or buried in a pile of raked leaves.

Childhood curiosity bounced around like a bubble of mercury from a broken thermometer. That’s just nature in action.

Who could have predicted, however, that an entire genre dedicated to deliberately pitting one animal, insect, or arthropod against another for sheer entertainment-value would one day become a multi-million dollar cottage industry?

But this has become the case in the Age of YouTube and Ten Thousand TV Channels, all staffed by obsessed juveniles and/or manic, self-appointed “outdoor adventurers”. Camel spiders are pitted against scorpions, mantids against lizards, boa constrictors against weasels, spiders against wasps, and on and on. And grown-up people watch, via television and computer screens, breathless and rapt to see “who’s gonna win.”

It’s all fairly bread-and-circuses kind of stuff—partially fascinating because one does get the chance to learn a bit about the characteristics of any given species tossed into the real or hypothetical fighting ring—but just like the ancient circuses it’s also more than a tad low-brow, prurient, exploitative, and absurd. “Bug Porn,” I call it, in general.

Take this essay about the potential battle match-up between a Great White Shark and a Bull Shark, for example. A lot of cyber-ink is spilled on the respective traits and weapons and characteristics of each shark species, which is fairly boilerplate at this point in time, when the populace is saturated with general Shark Knowledge due to obsessive post-midnight eyes glued to kitschy “nature”-based entertainment channels.

An adult Bull Shark is never going to get the best of an adult Great White Shark. Ever. Not unless it develops venom and the ability to spin immobilizing waterproof silk out of its ass, like the little spider that subdued the big cicada next to the crack in the chimney bricks when I was a kid.

But fascination with these sorts of encounters is a metaphor for what’s on everyone’s mind, at least subconsciously, and for what undergirds every moment of human reality: someone or something is constantly out to get you and, one day, you’re going to be eaten by that something.

Well, off to the chariot races. Happy Sunday.

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