Exoskeletal Majority
Somewhere embedded on the candlestick chart of historic tragedies, between, say, the Armenian Genocide and the Andrea Doria, is this: receiving an email from the responder ceviche.com.
Waking up to this missive brought me back to the day when I had a John S. Knight Journalism Fellowship for coverage of animal and environmental issues…now I realize that this is not the same occupational caliber of the Fourth Estate, as, for example, writing about visiting the homes of the wealthy and repeatedly giving shouts-out to one’s friends in the pages of a free weekly shopper magazine, but, still.
In any case one of the stories I wrote back in the day was about the infestation by roaches of some of Atlanta’s downtown landmarks. One of the things I learned was about roach housing, or harborage, in (for another example) restaurants housed in older structures amid a fairly high building density adjacent to bodies of water and a connected estuarial sewer system (this probably does not resonate at all!) was that, because the static population of roaches is always relatively high and self-managing through nice roach habits like juvenile cannibalism, and is also largely nocturnal, something really extraordinary has to happen in order for roaches to come out and be seen during the day (like, say, in a bustling bright loud kitchen during a health inspection?), there have to be so many roaches, such an explosion of the roach population, that, basically, they have to come out and forage to prevent from starving (and as you probably also know roaches can go a good while without eating).
So in such a situation, in addition to the stray visible roaches, we are talking about an infestation of, like, millions of roaches. If you took the lid off the nearest manhole cover and shot a leaf blower into it, the sky would turn black with flying roaches… So, that. PR might be able to spin the Benghazi situation, but all the consulting in the world can’t make millions of roaches go away. Except for the gullible in-crowd wannabes, who, in an obverse of the Emperor’s New Clothes, will simply will themselves into not seeing or thinking about them. The roaches, I mean… For a breakdown of roach-related health issues, please see this totally legit publication from the World Health Organization.