"The misconception of lemming "mass suicide" is long-standing and has been popularized by a number of factors. In 1955, Disney Studio illustrator Carl Barks drew an Uncle Scrooge adventure comic with the title "The Lemming with the Locket". This comic, which was inspired by a 1953 American Mercury article, showed massive numbers of lemmings jumping over Norwegian cliffs.[10][11] Even more influential was the 1958 Disney film White Wilderness, which won an Academy Award for Documentary Feature, in which staged footage was shown with lemmings jumping into certain death after faked scenes of mass migration.[12] A Canadian Broadcasting Corporation documentary, Cruel Camera, found the lemmings used for White Wilderness were flown from Hudson Bay to Calgary, Alberta, Canada, where they did not jump off the cliff, but were in fact launched off the cliff using a turntable."
Increasingly, I think the Disney Corporation has a lot to answer for. For one thing, the movie "Old Yeller" was just short of deliberate child abuse. Disney spent 90 minutes making the doomed mutt lovable and then finished him off in the final scenes. Now, with the kind of superficial research possible in the Internet age, I learn that the whole lemming mass suicide thing is a myth, what the Aussies call a "furphy." A load. I recall that there was a wooden turntable for humans in the Fun House in Playland-At-The-Beach, in the San Francisco of my distant youth, but it was for fun (as should be the case in a Fun House) and not for throwing us all to certain death.
Despite the apocryphal nature of the lemming story, not a day goes by where I don't see the U.S. Congress compared to these close relatives of voles and hamsters, with the point of comparison being the willingness, even the sense of destiny, of Congress as it rushes toward its own cliff, this one fiscal in nature. Indeed, the whole metaphor of "cliff" is probably derived from the lemming myth, which means that our Congress also gets its images from the Disney Corporation. What next, multiplying buckets of water?
Meanwhile, down in Mexico, the PRI has been returned triumphantly to power. The PRI, the organ at the center of Mexico's "guided democracy" from 1929 to 2000, spent twelve years in the wilderness, but now the gentle gente of Mexico have come to their senses and stopped their useless experiment with multi-party democracy. I can't help but think we were part of the inspiration. America pretends to have two parties, but for all practical purposes we just have two wings of our own PRI.
When I saw that "1929" as the initiating date for the long hegemony of the PRI, I knew something, and something violent, must have happened to get the PRI started. I don't know if you've ever read any detailed Mexican history, but you're missing a treat if you haven't. American history is totally bland by comparison. We had the Revolutionary War, then the Civil War, then our participation in World War II (World War I was a cameo). Those events would cover about a decade of Mexican history. The instability of Mexican government up until, well, 1929 was such that there was practically never a time when the Mexicans weren't at war with each other. In the 1920's it was the Cristero War (Cristero meaning, roughly, "Christer"), and it came about because Mexico elected an atheist president, Plutarco Calles, something the U.S. has never done (at least an avowed atheist, although let's be real here - do Clinton and Obama really seem pious to you?). Calles essentially wanted to abolish the Catholic Church, a large undertaking in Mexico, as you might imagine, with complete secularization of schools and government and restrictions on the right of priests to appear in public. It sparked a rebellion by the Cristero army, with assistance from the U.S., which wanted to make sure Mexico didn't get any bright ideas about nationalizing the oil fields (another dreary monotony in American history) while they were persecuting Catholics.
The rebellion succeeded, the government was forced to relent in its anti-church crusade, and Mexico settled into the traditional aftermath of one of its wars, a decade of revenge murders, torture and multi-purpose atrocities. Then the PRI took charge and reliable corruption once again asserted itself. Along the way, Cardenas did in fact nationalize the oil fields in Mexico, and hired none other than Leon Trotsky (in exile in Mexico at the time) as one of his polemicists. His arguments against American pretensions to ownership of Mexican oil fields are classic anti-imperialist screeds.
On my various visits to Mexico, I've always found the commoners there far more realistic about the corruption of their federal government than their American counterparts; the latter insist on believing in the mythology of "ideological differences" between the parties. One can line up the main elements of the federal budget and see at a glance where the problems are: a medical system that costs far too much and a runaway defense budget. If each of these two components were cut in half, the budget crisis would be solved, and at no real cost to the quality of life in America. We pay twice as much per capita for medical care in the United States compared to comparable First World countries, yet rank 37th in the world in the quality of care. The U.S. defense budget is premised on re-fighting World War II, which is no longer possible in the nuclear age. We need a home guard and a nuclear umbrella; nothing else is sensible.
Such sanity is unthinkable because our own PRI, with its Janus-faced components, will not allow sanity, because it disturbs the power base of our elected-for-life D.C. bureaucrats. So these large, bipedal lemmings (not nearly as cute as their Rodentia inspiration) will hem, haw, extend, pretend and do nothing effective, pulling back from the cliff in the nick of time. For now.
We're gonna need a bigger turntable.
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