Lemmings
This is gonna be the greatest,
This is gonna beat 'em all.
This is gonna be amazing,
Watch me as I fall.
You can't take away the feeling,
You don't argue with the call.
I'm above a billion people,
Watch me as I fall.
The dream where I've been living,
It's not where I belong.
I feel like I've been giving up a lot.
The secret I've been keeping,
It sounds just like a song.
I'm saving light and sweeping up the dark.
This is gonna make me happy,
This is gonna stand up tall.
This is gonna make 'em listen,
Watch me as I fall.
It's you where I've been living.
It's you where I belong.
It's you that I've been missing all along.
This is gonna make me better,
Watch me as I fall
From you.
Starring:
Julia Marshall-Mead
Joe Siddle
Directed and Edited by George O'Regan
In the 1530s geographer Zeigler of Strasbourg suggested that lemmings appeared via spontaneous generation, fell out of the sky during stormy weather, and then died suddenly when the grass grew in spring. This was vociferously disputed by Ole Worm, who claimed they were brought by the wind since he rejected the idea of spontaneous creation. In 1953, in the short story "The Possessed," Arthur C. Clarke atributed their suicidal urges to the lingering consciousness of an alien group-mind which had inhabited the species in the prehistoric past. Lemmings are a small rodent, usually found in tundra biomes near the Arctic. They are subniveal animals, and (with voles and muskrats) they make up the subfamily Arvicolinae (also known as Microtinae), part of the superfamily Muroidea, by far part of the largest mammal radiation (it includes rats, mice, hamsters, and gerbils). They are solitary animals by nature, meeting only temporarily to mate, but like all rodents they have a high reproductive rate and can breed rapidly when food is plentiful and have periodic population booms before dispersing in all directions in search of food and habitat. (The Norway and brown lemmings reproduce so quickly that their population fluctuations are chaotic, peaking evry four years or so and then dropping to near extinction.) When large numbers of them migrate, some inevitably drown crossing rivers and lakes, but they do not commit mass suicide by jumping off cliffs. Nevertheless, lemmings have become metaphors for people who go along unquestioningly with popular opinion, with potentially dangerous or fatal consequences.
ReplyDeleteBlink 182 Van der Graaf Generator have both used this metaphor in their songs entitled "Lemmings," and The Police, in "Synchronicity II" refr to people in rush hour traffic "packed like lemmings into shiny metal boxes / contestants in a suicidal race."