Ants and Conservatives: Both Out to Kill My Buzz

by Jim Washburn

“Wait! There’s been a slaughter here!”

It’s ant season again at the Washburn compound. Roses may be coming into bloom elsewhere, and in other homesteads men are rejoicing over the first gentle nubs of cantaloupe appearing on their vines. Me? I’m watching ants crawl out of the ceiling fixtures.

I’m slaughtering them in numerous ways. One of the more satisfying is taking a heavy cylindrical brass steel guitar slide—such as you would hear motivating the glissando on a Hank Williams 78—and driving it like a Don Martin steamroller over the ants. They seem to recognize the sound of its approach. Indifferent to many other threats, when they sense this thing clattering over the tiles, they scramble like a Panzer division’s coming.

Pardon me, I just took a break to crush about 20 of them. I don’t know if it’s the formic acid, but you can smell their deaths: it’s a little like scented fabric softener. As I sometimes do, I left their squished bodies where they lay, to sow dismay among any sensitive young Jim Morrison ant who might happen upon the carnage. Then he’ll hear the rumble of brass over tile, growing louder, louder. That’s right, little ant: No one here gets out alive.

That’s a trick I’ve taken from the terrorist playbook: You wreak havoc on a scene, where the destruction to life and limb draws a heroic response from their fellows; then you take them out with a second attack. It’s one of the most heartless things al Qaeda and the Taliban do, cynically using people’s courage and compassion against them.

I do it to the ants without a second thought now. I’m done reasoning with them. I generally take a live-and-let-live approach with vermin. But when they come pouring out of my ceiling by the thousands, as they did last year, I’ve had it with them.

Thus far, they’re making a less dramatic presentation of it this year. Instead of swarming out of the fixtures like a horde of inverted Hittites in a Bible epic, now it’s more like having busloads of Jehovah’s Witnesses dispatched into your neighborhood.

I don’t have to wear a hat while I type like I did last year, but I do still have the occasional six-legged distraction land on me. Just the other day I was at the gas station filling up, feeling mugged by the pump as it ratcheted up near the $60 mark, when a homeless guy approached me for some change. I handed him some bills and was feeling all grand and magnanimous, when the guy did me a favor. He got a startled look on his face and cried, “Look out, man! You got an ant about to crawl in your eye!”

I had been feeling a tickling on my face, and that’s what it was. I’ve had ants in my eyes, and I can’t say I care for it. I caught the little fella right as he was breaching my lower eyelashes and crushed it between my fingers, just as I have this minute crushed one that was crawling onto my computer keyboard. I’ve gone zero tolerance. Unless an ant is actively carrying poison back to the colony, I kill it. It’s an automatic reflex now, like how Jason Bourne can’t step into a hotel room without snapping necks. If you have mandibles, I will kill you. I will kill your family. I will kill your queen.

How do I kill thee? Let me count the ways. The ants have primarily been waging a ground war this time, so the vacuum cleaner I used last year to slurp them off the ceiling hasn’t seen much use. I step on a lot of them. Since I usually wear running shoes, though, there is so little tread actually contacting the ground that I have to stamp my foot like I’m Jerry Lee Lewis doing “Breathless” to finally connect with the target.

I’ve been using a broom; make that plural, since one fell to pieces on me and a second is threatening to do the same. That’s how much sweeping I’ve been doing. I can sweep an area of the floor clear of them and two minutes later it’s a busy plaza again.

I sweep them into a corner where I have a little pile of boric acid waiting. The sweeping motion alone kills a lot of the ants, and the rest are so disheveled that the boric acid makes quick work of them. While less toxic than table salt for mammals, it kills ants in two exciting ways. Like diatomaceous earth, boric acid etches their exoskeletons. When ingested, it is a slow stomach poison that disrupts their metabolic system.

My ant problem is in the back house/office of the Washburn Republic. I have it ringed on three sides by boric acid powder, though the ants continually find ways to breach it. Some days it seems like I have the upper hand and they’ve given up. Then there are days like yesterday, when they were assaulting on three different fronts, with thousands of them massed near the water heater. So it’s kill, kill, kill all over again and they still don’t get the message. Now I carry that message into the yard, using a pyrethin-based spray to attack their trails and hangouts.

There is a fourth wall to the back house—no scrimping here!—but it faces onto my next door neighbor’s yard. There’s all manner of foliage up against the house there, and I can’t figure out a non-damaging way to get at the ants, much less how to form that as a question for my neighbor: “I have cause to believe you are harboring ants. The Washburn Doctrine asserts my right to attack ...”

My biggest problem seems to be that most of the ants affronting me live in the ceiling and/or walls. I’ve tried most of the commercial ant baits. Not only do they contain toxins I don’t like, but they don’t attract ants at all. Do chemists make lousy chefs? I don’t know, but they sure can’t make an ant trap that appeals to ants.

That’s why, last year and now, I’ve made my own baits of three parts sugar to one part boric acid dissolved in hot water, into which I dip cotton balls, which I hang from pipe cleaners from the light fixtures. As I noted last year, this looks to the uninitiated like I’ve been throwing tampons at my ceiling.

Just recently I came across a commercial boric acid-based trap that actually attracts ants, made by Terro and available at Ace Hardware. Put one of these in the ants’ path, and it’s like the Good Humor truck pulled up. They are all over it, then they hurry off to take some home to the kids.

The thing is, I’m not so sure that the Terro company doesn’t have a secret deal with the ants, one where all these traps are actually only delivering the ant equivalent of Red Bull right to their door, providing them the pep to work twice as hard at killing my buzz. Food-borne boric acid can take three weeks or more to kill off a colony. We’re about at that point now, yet they just keep on coming.

The numbers—on the ground, ceiling and walls—are far lower than last year. I don’t know if that’s due to early diligence on my part or if maybe their swarming season hasn’t really started yet. Usually, it’s after several real hot days, when their bigger flying brothers hatch. Flying ants really give me the creeps. There’s just no reasoning with them.

I’m wondering lately if reason hasn’t become passé for humans, too. I’ve mentioned before that I have Republican friends. Some are sweet-natured guys, until the subject turns to Obama, Jews or other apparent irritants on the national scene.

I’ll be forwarded a late night email lambasting Obama for deceitfully hogging undeserved credit for nailing bin Laden, when the real work involved had clearly been done by George W. Bush and his crew. This email was from a person who also thinks this whole bin Laden killing was a fraud perpetrated by Obama.

I responded that in the statements I’ve heard Obama make about bin Laden’s killing he was always careful to credit the long years of work of all involved, and that he had invited Bush to join him at Ground Zero. And since I am far less gracious than Obama, I went on to note that Bush was the one who had shut down the CIA unit tracking bin Laden; and who by invading Iraq had taken his eyes way off the ball while earning us the distrust of much of the world and its espionage agencies who might have helped us find bin Laden, and also that the only way Bush might have found bin Laden was if he’d been hiding in the brush at the Crawford ranch, since Mr. I Won’t Rest Until bin Laden’s Brought to Justice spent more time on vacation than any president in our history.

Among my friend’s responses to this was that I’m always playing the Bush card and how when I’m 95 years old I’ll still be blaming Bush for everything, this despite the fact that he’s the one who brought Bush up to begin with. I does happen to be true that I’ll still be blaming Bush when I’m 95 because he is so damn blameworthy. Obama’s not the one whose administration ignored the warning that bin Laden intended to attack on US soil; he’s not the one who lied us into a needless war that has cost thousands of American lives and over 100,000 others; he’s not the one who crashed the economy.

There have been other emails since, about how that “fucking Kenyan” is stabbing Israel in the back, threw Mubarak under a truck, etc., and most recently how Obama’s mercilessly prosecuting the patriotic whistleblower Tom Drake, who had revealed some extra-constitutional actions of the NSA. Drake’s cause has recently been championed in the New Yorker and by 60 Minutes, both otherwise prime members of the “liberal media” my friend despises.

I, too, feel that Drake shouldn’t be prosecuted, but that Obama might not entirely be the villain here, writing back:

Finally, something I agree with you on, in part. A few things: Drake was first arrested for this in 2007, and the case against him was built up under the Bush administration (and no, I'm not playing the "Bush card"; it just happens to be a fucking fact). The information Drake had revealed was far more embarrassing to the government than it was damaging, but it also probably does constitute a breach of national security classified material, which puts it in an entirely different ballpark from the corporate whistle-blowing you compared it to.

The deeply unconstitutional, not to mention fiscally wasteful, domestic spying program Drake had revealed was wholly the product of the Republican Bush administration, so if Obama is the craven political animal you're constantly depicting him as, why isn't he celebrating Drake as a hero? Instead, as far as I can tell, he's just letting the law take its course. The Justice Department thinks a crime has been committed, and has built a case to that effect. Drake will get his day in court. To interfere in that, Obama would be exhibiting the hubris he's accused of in the other bullshit article you sent me.

 I think Obama cow-tows too much to our security apparatus, but the simple fact here is that he is our Commander in Chief, with a responsibility to maintain our security, and I'm pretty damn sure that if he had intervened in the Justice Department's prosecution, you and your fellows on the right would be making hay out of how unpatriotic he is and how willing he is to damage our security. The guy can do no right in your book.

There is plenty about Obama's actions I don't like, but he got handed a bigger plate of shit when he came into office than nearly any president in our history. Thanks to him, we didn't, yet, plummet into a 25-year Depression; bin Laden is dead; we're ratcheting our presence down in Iraq; his administration is responding capably to a string of the some of the worst natural disasters we've had in our history. It's a tough gig, and he's nowhere near cracking, no thanks to the unthinking, unpatriotic hatred directed at him from some quarters.

As politically ignorant and uninformed as you continually claim I am, I defy you to find something in this piece that isn't accurate.      

My friend forwarded that email to one of his friends, who responded, “You need to either not discuss politics with people like this—or just put them out of your life completely. There is nothing you can ever tell them that will make a difference.”

There followed another email from my friend saying I’m the poster boy for white elitist liberal racists, and then another email that his email would henceforth be blocking all messages from my wife and me.

We’re back to being friends, of course, and are having dinner on Memorial Day, and maybe we’ll avoid the politics, which is just as well, since it does seem impossible to change minds when the basic tools for doing so, such as facts, no longer have any place in the debate.

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