I am a bit tired today. I’ve had a busy month of travel and the last week was particularly intense.
I have been in bed most of the day and the immobility coming with this day of fatigue has allowed me to thoroughly participate in a number of extremely online activities.
If you’ve not been following along the TLDR is that a squirrel named Peanut living in an animal sanctuary run by New Yorkers Mark and Daniela Longo was seized by the Department of Environmental Conservation and subsequently euthanized.
A raccoon was also taken and killed but Peanut was an Internet celebrity and we live in an age of viral contagion and within a few hours all Twitter could talk about was Peanut.
Why does this matter? Well, giant bureaucracies killing pets has an uncomfortable history in America. If you want to dig on the lesser known lore check out gun subreddits for ATF dog killer memes.
So potent is this history it has emerged as the ideal 11th hour election meme for the restless population that is uncomfortable about the power of the federal government.
I’ll quote my friend Anton’s tweet from a thread I’d recommend on Christian semiotics and Peanut.
actually you know what? the squirrel is an anti-christ. we are in the midst of a huge mimetic crisis and rather than scapegoating the squirrel to eliminate the conflict and avert violence, we instead elevate the squirrel’s death to heighten the conflict even further – @atroyn
Different political alignments experience the fear of governmental overreach, and in particular its monopoly on violence, in different ways. We occasionally make martyrs of those who experience that this violence to understand its horrors.
Squirrel martyrdom invokes an entirely BLM than the BLM who arose after the death of George Floyd. I say let us consider them both iconoclasts (in the religious sense) of the same fear of death through state means. They are symbols of idolatry who become sanctified.
Floyd’s death touched on frustration over systemic racism in the judicial system, Peanut’s death touches on frustration over government overreach – John Ennis
Leviathan wakes and we tremble.