Drupelets

An update to this post from February: The plague of suicidal skunks abated by mid-March, but now something else has come up. I've lived in this town for nearly twenty years now, and in all that time I didn't see three dead raccoons on the streets. But in the past three or four weeks I've seen eight or ten dead coons, scattered all around town. They've been full-grown animals, not callow juveniles, up to maybe twenty-five pounds.

I've seen roughly as many dead coons in town in the past month as I've seen on highways across the whole state in my entire life. Heck, the raccoon body count has been higher than the possum count.

Now, raccoons are smart animals. Not like possums, with brains still stuck in the Cretaceous era—at least one science fiction writer (I can't remember who) suggested that after the human race has killed itself off, the coons will most likely be next to develop into a race of tool-using world-changers. I've heard stories of raccoons that could turn lights on and off, unhook screen doors, and generally make a nuisance of themselves with trash cans, bait buckets, and other sources of tasty tidbits. Crossing the street without becoming a ring-tailed statistic shouldn't be much of a strain on a raccoon's intelligence.

So why are they piling up in the flipping streets? Did they reach some level of population where the pheromone saturation triggered the "Duh" gene? Have herds of them suddenly started migrating south for the winter? Have farmers started live-trapping them and dumping them in town, the way we used to live-trap our excess squirrels and take them out of town?

There could be some natural process at work. But I'm beginning to suspect something more sinister.

Unselective breeding

For who can say how long, humans have been working to protect themselves from their own stupidity and carelessness. Not just themselves personally, but themselves as a group, total strangers as well as family and friends. Altruistic guardianship, you see.

(I don't mean seat belts in cars—I wear a seat belt to protect myself from other people's stupidity. I don't mean safety latches on cabinets to protect children from their own ignorance and their parents' stupidity. And I don't mean the absurd warning labels you can find these days [yes, these are supposed to be warnings people have actually seen]: "This hair coloring should not be used as an ice cream topping." "Do not use blowtorch while sleeping." "Do not attempt to drive car with sun shade in windshield." "Do not use toilet brush orally." Warnings like this are to protect the manufacturer from asinine lawsuits; they're not going to stop a careless person from using her curling iron on her eyelashes.)

• Your steam iron has a sensor that turns it off before it sets your shirts on fire.


• Your power saw has a blade guard and double-action trigger so you have to make a real effort to cut your hand off.


• Your shower head has a high-temperature shutoff so you don't parboil yourself by carelessly turning the wrong knob.


• Your birth-control pills have dummy pills for the days you don't need hormones, so you don't get knocked up from forgetting what week it is.


• Your town has a fire department so that when you use gasoline to start your charcoal grill, you only burn down your deck.


• Your government mandates food labeling to help you remember that pork rinds and ice cream are fattening.

Nowhere are you more zealously defended from yourself than in your car:

• Your car has an air bag so that if you forget your seat belt you can still avoid leaving brain matter on the windshield.


• In case you, at the first sign of trouble, generally try to stomp the brake pedal through the floor, your car has anti-lock brakes so that you don't totally lose control.


• Your car even has a little warning light on the gas gauge and little warning chimes for when you leave the headlights on, so that you don't find yourself stranded in the cold with an empty tank or a dead battery.

Is all this protection a good thing? If you're a stupd or incurably careless person, probably so, on an individual basis. But in the long run, do measures like these tend to make the human race as a whole grow gradually more stupid?

What would happen if casual, everyday stupidity was fatal?

You start your car and back out of the driveway without fastening your seat belt. As you shift into Drive, the "stupid" relay in the car's black box trips. Suddenly, your car takes control, and drives you in front of an oncoming freight train.

You open your washing machine without waiting for the spin cycle to end. A cable shoots up, loops around your neck, and drags your head down to drown you in the drum.

You put a movie in your DVD player upside down. As you press Play, The Matrix shoots out at warp speed, slicing you neatly in two just above the clavicles. There is no stupid.

You press the Power button on your computer without shutting down Windows first. A muscle-spasming surge of electricity zaps through your body, throwing your heart into fatal ventricular fibrillation. (And just in case you survive, Windows deletes your files and transfers your bank balance to Planned Parenthood.)

Would the human race be improved? Would the average human become smarter, tougher (at least a few people would survive the locomotive and the electric shocks), more efficient, more graceful, more talented—a race of supermen living in a murderous utopia?

Or would we simply breed out that class of useful if not terribly bright drones that does the dull repetitive work, so that our garbage cans are emptied or our chickens processed or our tires rotated by a genius with the clockwork precision of Tiger Woods, the flashing dexterity of Eric Clapton, and the unworldly grace of Peggy Fleming, but who is terribly, unavoidably bored by his life, until ennui drives him to desperation and one day, in a fit of Nietzschean despondency, he deliberately attempts to open his aspirin bottle bottle without first aligning the arrow on the rim of the bottle with the arrow on the cap, triggering a deadly burst of poison gas?

Are you still with me? I said I was beginning to suspect something sinister.

Selective speeding

The human race has been protecting itself from individual and to some extent collective stupidity, and it may be that we've therefore reached the limits of our intellectual evolution. But what if the raccoons have reached some critical evolutionary cusp and become aware of themselves as a race, in direct competition with us? What if they've begun a conscious breeding program? What if they've found a way to make stupidity fatal?

"What here? Are you crazy?" "Nope, this's the spot, Rufus. The Coon Council says this is the only place we're allowed to cross Van Buren at night." Whizzz! "Boy, they washed their brains and can't do a thing with'em. With that sharp hill there you've got, what, two seconds of visibility from here?" "It's easy. Just watch me. As soon as this car goes by—" Whizzz! "—I'll show you. See the way that bush just lit up? Three—four—five—six—seven—eight—" Whizzz-zzz! "See, Rufe? It catches the headlights before the car gets to the crest of the hill. Gives you a good five seconds of extra warning." "Okay, I'll try it." Whizzz! "Still dark. I'm going!" Scrabble–scrabble–Whizzz–THUMP! "Oooh, too bad he didn't notice how that service station sign shades the bush when the wind shifts." "Well, Rufe never was the ripest acorn on the tree."

Picture two curves on a graph. The higher curve has been rising for a long time, but leveled off a few hundred years back and is now beginning to trend downward. The lower curve has been rising more slowly, but now it suddenly takes on a sharp upward angle, with the slope gradually but steadily increasing. The curves won't meet in a year, or a hundred years—but someday there will come a convergence.

Protect the future of the human race! Don't run over raccoons in the street!

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