I’m not one to give much credence to those who prophesize the end of the world, as entertaining as some of those claims and claimants may be.
But one can’t look at a newspaper or turn on the evening news without wondering if we’re on the verge of something big. The Middle East is again exploding in war. Gaza and the Sudan are facing mass starvation. Countries across the world are turning rightward and embracing autocracy.
In our own country, the gulf between the left and the right has reached new levels of animosity, and the gap between the two is nearly as wide as the growing gap between the rich and the poor. To the surprise of many, we’ve just learned that in America there is at least one person who is above the law. Diplomacy and statesmanship and compassion have given way to acrimonious name-calling and naked greed. Our government is paralyzed and ineffective, fiddling a mindless death dirge while the middle class disappears and the poor suffer. Famine, plagues, war, rumors of war, pestilence and Tucker Carlson assault us every day. Could things possibly get any worse?
They could, and they have.
Not long ago, residents of Burlington, Vt., reported being attacked by one or more renegade gray squirrels. One man reported that a squirrel repeatedly jumped on his back while he was shoveling snow. Another woman was mauled badly enough by a combative squirrel to have to undergo rabies treatment. State animal experts explained the attacks by suggesting that the assaultive squirrels may have been raised as pets, thereby losing their fear of humans.
I have another theory. Can anyone be sure that these “innocent” gray squirrels aren’t actually specially trained guerilla squirrels recruited by Vladimir Putin to spread bushy-tailed terror throughout the heartland? Would it be so hard to lure these naïve and impressionable young rodents into making suicide squirrel attacks on ordinary citizens with gauzy promises of ascending to a squirrel heaven where nuts grow on trees and there are no dogs, owls or teenage boys with pellet guns? If Congress were not so busy trying to take away our healthcare and burn books, I’d demand an immediate Congressional hearing.
And the scary news continues. Scientists recently came across the largest living organism on earth, and it’s neither a blue whale nor Charles Barkley. This massive creature is more than 2,400 years old, or nearly as old as President Biden and ex-President Trump combined. It lives in the remote Malheur National Forest of Eastern Oregon. Perhaps most frighteningly of all, it’s a fungus, one that covers some 2,200 acres to a depth of 3 feet or more in some places. That’s an area the size of 1,665 football fields. This fungus is commonly known as a honey mushroom.
Why should we be concerned about an unnaturally large honey mushroom in Eastern Oregon? Well, for one thing, the mushroom is killing off trees by sending slender black threads called rhizomorphs into the soils and roots of innocent, hard-working, tax-paying American trees, drawing moisture and nutrition away from the tree to feed its bottomless fungal gullet.
Even more terrifying, if terrorists have hooked up with gray squirrels in Vermont, isn’t it only a matter of time before they begin recruiting giant mushrooms and enormous fungi in their nefarious schemes to overthrow what’s left of America? After all, what lives in those trees the giant mushrooms are killing off in Oregon? That’s right. Gray squirrels. Coincidence, or irrefutable proof of an interspecies/Russian conspiracy to destroy our American way of life?
Tom Tyner of Bainbridge Island writes a weekly humor column for this newspaper.
