The Slow, Sad Decline Of Our Friend The Carpenter Ant

It may surprise our religious friends that the savior of the insect species was not ever a carpenter ant. No, the Insect Messiah will probably not come from colony species such as ants, bees, termites or Scientologists. As we pore over our insect religious texts, we understand that the Insect Messiah will travel long distances to preach to worker ants & worker bees, often outside busy nests, mainly attempting to liberate the workers from their queens. Queens in such cases are perhaps equivalent to the ancient god-kings of the old city-states. In any case, the Insect Messiah has her work cut out for her.

But one needn't be terribly concerned with the Insect Messiah to feel both pity & condescension toward the carpenter ant. This particular species of ant is particularly pathetic. For many hundreds of years now, its culture & literature have languished, & no scholar in her right mind disputes the reason: the shift from living in rotting logs to living in rotting human domiciles. What was once a thriving ant society, with dance, philosophical discussion, & hearty persecution of the drones, has now become a docile, dull totalitarian hive which spends its few leisure hours listening to Fox News on the television. Carpenter ants cannot vote, of course, but studies have shown that if they could vote, they'd to a single ant vote for the Butt Party. This, in contravention to many millenia as free thinkers & robust political gadabouts. It's enough to make the scholar weep for insectkind.

It's no surprise an industry has sprung up making big bucks on the control & eradication of the carpenter ant - they have truly become unpleasant creatures, boring to be around, simple-minded, dull-witted, tiring. If we are to believe their own literature - which has, fortunately, been saved by spiders in their complex spider libraries - these creatures were once the bon vivants of at least the Formicidae world, although their charm even now surpasses that of the boorish wasps, but that's not saying much. One can, if it so suits one, weep for their cultural programming & their capitulation to it, but instead it seems to many that, on the eve of the return of the Insect Messiah, we must move to other, more fertile areas of insect progress & scholarship, & leave those lost causes behind, praising their contributions in the past but regretting the fact that, when the insects rise up to consume the world, the carpenter ant will be not be an integral part of the revolution, but, alas, will find itself among the consumed.