When I heard that New York City had appointed a Rat Czar I thought, well, I guess it was inevitable since they already have rat kings. And a friend of mine said, “Hey, it’s about time they got some representation. Wait, what do you mean the Rat Czar is a human?”
And he had a point. The history of rats is deeply tied up with our own history. For most of it they’ve been seen as enemies—including some really vile propaganda that compared people to rats. I don’t want to highlight that but at the same time I don’t think comparing humans to rats—all humans, not just certain groups—isn’t so far off the mark. Rats are territorial but also social, rats form communities and work collectively. They’re smart and make really good pets. I might feel differently if I lived in an apartment building with a rat problem but there’s a reason our relationship with rats is complicated. They carry diseases but then so do cats, dogs, birds, insects, and humans too.
Rats are also mammals like us, and they’re survivors. Sometimes I think we have such a primal response to them because we recognize them as our ancestors. It was rodents, after all, who survived the mass extinction that wiped out the dinosaurs. Maybe that’s why there’s a long lineage of our not so simple relationship with rats that even predates the medieval Pied Piper of Hamlin, which got a brilliant satirical update in the 1920s by the terribly underrated Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva, all the way up through The Secret of NIMH and Ratatouille. You can throw Willard in there, either the 1971 original or its 2003 remake with Crispin Glover for something a little darker.
Since April is National Poetry Month here’s a poem I wrote back in 1998, inspired from a line from a National Geographic special about rats, “There’s a war going on in our cities…and the rats are winning.”
Ratopolis
Rats are winning the war for the city,
Displacing us as they come from below.
While our tactics are softened with pity
Rats are winning the war for the city.
Gassing and poisons aren’t pretty,
And not all is fair in war though we know
Rats are winning the war for the city,
Displacing us as they come from below.
Displacing us as they come from below
The rats teach us something we always knew.
By steady process, since our brains are slow,
Displacing us as they come from below,
The rats whisper to us we are rats too.
Our lives are mingled; that’s the status quo.
Displacing us as they come from below
The rats teach us something we always knew.
Thanks for teaching us things we ought to know, Chris.
ANN J KOPLOW recently posted…Day 3758: What doesn’t suck
We’re all always learning so I’m glad to share what I know. Even if it is about rats.
I hope I don’t have nightmares tonight. Just saying your refrain is kind of stuck in my brain, now. La la la, I can’t hear you. Rats! That isn’t working.
For some reason the poetic form I picked for that poem is one known as a triolet, maybe because rats are collective and repetitive in their behaviors. Well, if you still have trouble getting over it there’s a Kinks song I can recommend.