Every morning…just about…me and Marcel (not “Marcel and I”) check out our Far Side hysterical/historical calendar, laugh, and make note of whatever holiday’s upon us…which often leads to him (not “his”) sticking an appropriate country flag into his flag stand next to the living room sofa. Y’know…anniversary of Hiroshima leading to that land of the rising sun image going up. That kind of thing. Then he crumples the cartoon of the day before dropping it on the floor. “Pick it up, Papi, okay?”.

Well, the other day –This is all unedited, by the way, stream of unconsciousness at play here– we came across a group of cartoon lemmings (on holiday?), driving down Route 66, with the father behind the wheel, warning the lemming kids in the backseat (much to Mama Lemming’s consternation) that if they don’t quiet down he is going to drive right off the next cliff.

We all know where the basis of that humor comes from, right? Wrong.

From Derrick Jensen’s new book Thought to Exist In The Wild: Awakening from the Nightmare of Zoos:

“And did you know that lemmings do not actually jump off of cliffs and commit suicide? The suicide story, it ends up, is a complete fabrication. Lemming populations do explode and crash, but that’s based on their deeply intimate relationship with their four main predators: stoats, Arctic foxes, snowy owls, and long-tailed skuas. Lemmings are fecund, and without predation their population rises quickly. Lots of lemmings mean that the stoats, foxes, owls, and skuas have lots of food, and so they have lots of babies too. Their population rises. They eat lots of lemmings, whose population crashes, leading to a die-off of especially the stoats, wh prefer lemmings to all other foods. The foxes, owls, and skuas move on to other foods, and the lemmings begin to repopulate. The cycle begins anew. This is how it has always been.

But wait! What about the mass suicides? What about that famous scene in that 1958 Disney movie True-Life (sic) Adventures: White Wilderness in which we see the lemmings jumping off a cliff? It was staged. As David Perlman reported in the San Francisco Chronicle, ‘Disney’s camera crew was filming in Alberta where lemmings don’t live. So the crew imported their own lemming extras, herded them together to stimulate a mass migration and then drove them into a Hollywood-style panic to the edge of (a)…cliff, from which they leaped to their deaths en masse.’

Walt Disney was making a snuff film….”

That only came out in 2003. Too late for me (in a way)…for I was in my formative years in 1958. Thanks to Derrick and his colleagues (connected with the groundbreaking, soul-shaking book), it’s actually…now…not “too late.”

And it’s not too late for the reader to rendezvous with me in person at the earliest possible convenience (or ASAP) to discuss what we might do in solidarity about this kind of abomination…that is ongoing, all-pervasive. With immediate, very private impact. If you do meet with me (or email me at rmoxman@yahoo.com), I promise to connect all this to Beauty in poetry, its correlation with perfect grammar, the far side of our cultural values and –last, but certainly not least– the relationship the above has to your personal options during ecological collapse.

Richard Oxman, foraging at present in Los Gatos, California, encourages one and all to contact Diane, one of the publishers of Derrick’s recent work, at diane@novoiceunheard.org. Perhaps she’ll be in a position to offer you some kind of discount if you mention my name. No promises, though. They’re all involved in a labor of love on that end. The book will change your life (and the life of others?), unless you’ve already been transformed irretrievably by the Body Snatchers. Even Derrick’s Choir will benefit greatly from this latest masterpiece. Forget about “activism,” this book can help everyone to take part in what I consider an obligatory personal activity: screaming out loud* at what has enveloped us all. That’s a necessary start on several counts.

P.S. *Aside from the cathartic value and the much-acclaimed potential the work has to make a difference in the world of animals, among other pluses is the fact –mentioned by zero reviewers, as far as I can determine– that this book can do more respecting improvement of parental skills (and related matters) than the top ten best selling self-help books in that realm. Check out the blah blah in Derrick’s tour de force with boredom, for one.