The Weekly Screed (#933)

The ophiocordyceps presidency

by David Benjamin

“I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.”

                                                      — Grover Norquist

MADISON, Wis. — Ever since I was an unwashed urchin turning over wet rocks next to the Lemonweir River and chasing bumblebees in Tillie Fredericks’ garden, bugs have served me as a sort of window on the world. 

For instance, I’ve come to grasp the theology of Reaganite Republican conservatism through my fascination with the ichneumon wasp, one of nature’s most subtle assassins. 

Before I tell the grisly tale of the ichneumon, I should drift back in time to review a theory of government, fostered by president Ronald Reagan, that got its mojo from Sen. Barry Goldwater. Although Barry was crushed in his 1964 bid for the presidency, his ideals seeded the imagination of the American right wing and grew like — well, we’ll get to that later — inside its brain. Goldwater animated the quaint notion that an ever-growing nation should be managed by an ever-shrinking government. The ultimate mission of this engineered depletion would be — as Grover Norquist, founder of Americans for Tax Reform, stated it — the veritable death and disappearance of the regulatory state, the Constitutional republic, the U.S. Congress, the Cabinet, the courts and even the presidency. Loveliest of all would be the banishment of all the taxes that fund these parasitic institutions.

It sounds silly when you put it thus. Goldwater, Reagan, Norquist and an army so-called “conservative” intellectuals have put it thus, nihilistically. But their actions have suggested that they didn’t entirely mean it. 

Take Reagan, please. 

It wasn’t ’til the Gipper took office in 1980 that any U.S. leader tried to actually enact the Goldwater philosophy. Here’s where you need to know more about the wondrous ichneumon wasp.

The ichneumon is an insect with a sinister aspect, a waistless, long-limbed, lace-winged fiend with a sharply pointed triangular head and an egg-laying ovipositor sticking out behind that can be three times the length of the rest of her body. The female, of course, is the deadly sex.  

When the ichneumon has a fresh fertilized egg in her womb, she looks around for another bug. She’s not exclusive, but she prefers a nice fat caterpillar. She lands on the slow, defenseless larva and slips the hypodermic tip of her tail between the pudgy folds of its flesh and inserts —fft! — her egg. And she flies away. The egg hatches by and by. Then, the wasp’s own larva begins to happily feast on the substance of the caterpillar until, well, a passage in the New World Encyclopedia says it well: “… For Charles Darwin, the life cycle of parasitic Ichneumonidae presented a religious conundrum: How could a just and benevolent God create a living being that deposited its eggs inside a caterpillar, such that the emerging wasp larvae would eat first the digestive organs, keeping the twitching caterpillar alive until the larva got to the more immediately vital organs?”

Cool, huh?

It can be argued that Ronald Reagan’s reign was an attempt at ichneumon administration, for it was the Gipper’s brainstorm to insert — into federal agencies that offended his anti-government beliefs — leaders who had, all their lives, opposed its functions. James Watt, an enemy of wildlife, was thus squirted as an ichneumon egg into the Department of the Interior. Anne Gorsuch, who never met an industrial polluter she didn’t love, became the ichneumon of the EPA.

Alas, the ichneumon wasp proved a poor metaphor for reduction in government, if only because the host in question was no mere caterpillar. The reality was more like Reagan, the ichneumon idealist, had slipped his (her) egg into the body of a humpback whale. The baby wasp could eat ’til it was ready to burst and the whale would never feel a thing. It could burrow through a mile of blubber without ever finding a vital organ. A thousand ichneumon eggs would have no more power than one egg to reduce the size of the federal whale.

Indeed, Interior survived Watt and Anne Gorsuch stumbled out of the EPA disgraced. Her only consolation was that she escaped with her ovipositor intact and eventually plunged one ravenous larva into the Supreme Court. 

The ichneumon strategy buzzed bravely, with little effect, through the two Republican Bush regimes. After George W. gave way to Barack Obama, the GOP dream of an untaxed, unregulated, unattached, ungoverned U.S.A. needed a new metaphor.

Enter the ophiocordyceps!

(Okay, I know. This is a long, hard-to-say word. But here’s a solution. Picture a pub in Dublin. Down at the end of the bar is Paddy, a ne’er-do-well lush avoided by one and all, because all he ever does is lament the dozens of unfair bosses who’ve fired him, run down his wife and complain that his kids are an ungrateful litter of heartless whelps. Paddy is a bore. His family used to be the O’Finians but somehow, over the years, the name developed syllable creep, so that Paddy ended up being baptized as Patrick O’Phiocordyceps. Easier, right?)

The ophiocordyceps family, much like Paddy, is parasitic. But, although it depends like the ichneumon on bugs, it’s not a bug itself. It’s a fungus.

If you think of Donald Trump as a deadly fungus, like black mold and toadstools, you’re catching the metaphorical spirit. But ophiocordyceps is way more insidious than a mere amanita phalloides!

Your typical ophiocordyceps spore just lies around the forest, on a twig or on a leaf, waiting for an ant to pass by. When it does, our invisible spore – let’s call it Paddy — attaches to the ant. It invades the ant’s body, growing into a tiny monster that devours every living organ. It kills the ant while taking over its brain and nervous system, turning its host into an ambulatory corpse — a zombie. Another bug, looking at the Paddy-infested, fungal-robot ant, might think it’s still alive. But the ant, discolored and psoriatic, is literally a shell of itself.

The best part comes after the ophiocordyceps has consumed every calorie of nourishment from the zombie. At last, the dead ant settles down and looks actually dead, clinging motionless to a twig. Now it’s time for Paddy to spawn. So, out of the zombie’s head a horn, almost as long as the dead ant’s body, emerges eerily. This hideous growth is fuzzy with fresh new baby ophiocordyceps spores that break loose with the slightest disturbance, drifting down to find new ants and begin the next generation of fungoid zombies.

Meanwhile, back in D.C., we can recall almost nostalgically Reagan’s feckless effort to insinuate a few ichneumon wasps into the Cabinet. By contrast, Donald Trump has spread ophiocordyceps spores throughout his forest, like Tinker Bell flinging fairy dust. It’s hard to judge which agency is being eaten faster from within — Bill Barr’s Tom Hagen DOJ, Betsy DeVos’ anti-public schools Education Department, Mike Pompeo’s damn-the-diplomats State Department? The list goes on. James Watt can only envy the hollowed-out husk of Interior devoured by the moldy maws of Ryan Zinke and David Bernhardt.

Perhaps most Paddy-like of all is Senate majority fungus Mitch McConnell, who looms over the court system like a hideous horn growing from the dead head of a zombie government, sprinkling the spores of self- consumption into every federal courthouse in the Mildewed States of America.

Luckily, this is only a metaphor. And the counter-analogy still prevails. You can kill an ant with a parasitic spore. But America — even as the fungal infestation of Donald Trump leaves it smelling a little funky — is still a big-ass whale.