Sunday, July 18, 2004

Noisy Bugs Aren’t Only Ones Making Irritating Racket


Every seventeen years, periodical cicadas emerge from their otherwise sedate underground burrows to serenade their ladies fair and to inconvenience humans unsettled by the disturbing countenance and unique musical tastes of these creatures. But unlike environmentalists and evolutionists, these pests are gracious enough to subject us to their whining only once every decade and a half and aren’t nearly as nerve-wracking.

In this age of postmodern subjectivism, it is never enough for the purveyors of secular scientific understanding to present philosophically unencumbered facts and allow individuals to draw their own conclusions about them. Since we are little more than buffoons in the eyes of the technocrats, we must be catechized as to what to think about the processes of the world around us to an extent exceeding anything taking place in any run-of-the-mill Sunday school or Bible college.

Along with a diagram detailing the life cycle of the cicada from its lengthy period of subterranean singleness sucking sap to its emergence and molting from its nymph to adult form as well as explaining the mechanics and purpose of their symphonic performances, the experts interviewed for a Washington Post Metro Section feature on May 16, 2004 waned ideological rather than keep things purely scientific.

To a number of so-called scientists and researchers, the vast numbers of cicadas are to serve as recruits in the cause of anti-human, anti-technology evolutionary environmentalism. Biologist David Dunn is upset that people compare the sound cicadas make to mechanical sources and laments these as “the sounds with which we have replaced the patterns of the natural world.”

If it weren’t for those pesky machines, Mr. Dunn wouldn’t be able to bombard readers with such Luddite foolishness. He probably wouldn’t even have the leisure time to cogitatively formulate such nonsense, idle hands being the Devil’s workshop and all.

Of course, should those like this researcher gain power, they won’t be the ones foregoing the comforts of modern life for the sake of environmental preservation; his ilk won’t be the ones forced to endure a life of drudgery, malnutrition, and disease all for the sake of getting back to nature. The likes of the Rockefellers, Kennedys, Kerrys and Bushes will always live in opulent luxury; it is you and I, dear reader, who will be forced to live lower than dirt and that at least will have the soil erosion lobby to look out for its interests.

Already the plight of cicadas is being used to pound additional nails into the coffins of development and environmental policy. According to the BBC, insect supremacists are lamenting that the cicada faces possible extinction since construction projects such as paved roads, houses, and other buildings block the immature cicadas from reaching the surface.

Woopteedo! Frankly these things are the bug world’s equivalent of welfare recipients in that they do nothing but eat, smell bad, and reproduce while contributing little or nothing productive to society in return for their upkeep. Why should we care if these pests become nothing more than a footnote in the annals of entomological history?

If the expanse of civilization does pose such a threat to cicada kind, does that mean human happiness and progress must come to a screeching halt? For in the minds of environmentalists, animal rights theoreticians, and the rest of those more infatuated with the creation that the Creator, you and I are no more important than that slimy slug slithering across your aluminum siding.

One bug brain composing cantatas as an act of worship of the cicada told the Washington Post of his musical composition in their honor, “I want to reflect the insectlike character of our own lives. The Post ads, “...his ambition for his...piece is not to emphasize difference.”

Heaven (rather Earth forbid in the minds of these fruitcakes) we acknowledge the distinction and hierarchy of species, something the animals --- dumb as they are --- don’t seem to have much of a problem with. Hegel, the father of the modern pantheism from which much of contemporary environmentalism ultimately flows, when confronted by a student that his audacious theories did not square with the facts of reality is alleged to have railed, “Then the facts be damned.”

As with its cousins Communism and Socialism, it is this callous disregard of the world as it really is in favor of how they’d like it to be that makes environmentalism especially dangerous. As such, the related movements of environmentalism and evolutionism are not so much based on testable scientific propositions as faith-based presuppositions.

Another scientist romantically swooned in the Post that these swarms of cicadas suggest “...what North America was like an eon ago, when these bugs rose to the top of an unpopulated continent’s vast forests...It gives me a sense of awe at the scale of evolutionary time.”

Things might be a little less crowded if we didn’t have these scientists playing philosopher to deal with. For anyone that comprehends cicadian engineering and ends up feeling all warm and fuzzy on the inside in praise of evolution has clearly been educated beyond all usefulness.

A top the Post feature article where tenured scientists waxed hysterical like convulsing holy rollers all over the church carpet was an informative diagram and flowchart detailing the life story of the cicada as well as mechanics behind its unique brand of music. Anyone thinking this ability came about on its own has a few cicadas of his flying around in his belfry.

According to the article, the male cicada is able to crease his tympana so as not to deafen himself as a result of his own racket. Does it make more sense that these powers and abilities were bestowed upon these creatures deliberately by a wise God or came about helter skelter by pot luck?

If God didn’t, did the cicadas all get together at a convention in Vegas and decide it would be prudent for amorous cicadas to close their ears and synchronize their friskiness so as to ensure safety in numbers and that the maximum number find love? If it’s all just the role of the dice, wouldn’t the cicada either end up all alone or blow out his ear in pursuit of his lady love?

Reformed theologian Cornelius Van Til observed that each of us looks at the world through the rose colored glasses of certain presuppositions that mold everything we see. Those who deny the handiwork of God throughout creation are just as religious as those who see the purposes of the Lord written throughout the pages of His handiwork.

Copyright 2004 by Frederick Meekins


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