death drive of beetles
My mother-in-law, who died near-ish to the beginning of our long Covid-19 nightmare/revery — not from Covid-19 but obviously there was nothing coincidental about the timing — used to say that she couldn’t understand how anyone could buy German. By “anyone”, she of course meant “anyone Jewish” or maybe even more specifically any member of her own extended family and by “buy German” she was talking about cars. Mercedes-Benz I think — there was a specific example that had originally inspired what became a set-piece? — though in trying to establish some hierarchy of guilt, the humble, so American but not, Volkswagen Beetle (originally commissioned by Adolf Hitler) of the 60s and 70s should really have been higher up in her sights.
I’m thinking about this because one of the strange reverberations that “moving to the country” (not really moving, but also not really the country) set off is the recovery of a skill I mastered in pre-teen years, namely killing Japanese beetles. I got confused this weekend, reading an article about far right-wing infiltration of the German army — wait, why does Germany have an army? didn’t they lose the “right” after WW2? But that was the Japanese. The Germans were able to start re-arming only a few years after the end of the war and I’m sure the Cold War had something to do with that; also, possibly, racism, but I’m not going to track that down right now.
We had Japanese beetles because we had rosebushes - wild roses? tea roses?
Here is what we had to do. Fill an empty frozen orange juice can with about an inch of gasoline (from the container used to fuel the lawnmower). Take a garden trowel and, with the trowel turned upside down, scrape the beetle off the leaf and into the can. As kids, my brother and I (I can’t speak for my two sisters, much younger) often had chores assigned to us but few were as satisfying and “results-oriented” as the killing of Japanese beetles.
A week ago, S and I were out front trying to figure out why our Chinese Silvergrass or miscanthus -- one of the few “plantings” that had come with the place when we bought it -- weren’t living up to expectation or at least the heights they’d attained the previous summer, when I noticed the tell-tale iridescent boxy shape of a Japanese beetle. Excited to have a dormant skill revived I explained the killing procedure but it turned out we had no gasoline which meant everyone looked to their phones to search “how to kill Japanese beetles”. “Soapy water” is the current recommendation and I find it hard to believe that my parents didn’t know that at the time. Was there something extra the gasoline brought to the procedure? Japanese beetles are fairly lethargic, in my experience — though the upside-down trowel was a strategic weapon since, even if they fluttered and tried to fly away, the width of the trowel would cover them like a collapsing circus tent. Likewise, it could be that the vapor of the gasoline acted as a kind of anesthesia — whether to minimize the cruelty or make the killing more effective, I can’t say.
(why we have this house at all — S prevailed, I demurred. Now of course he looks like a fucking genius and though all the reservations I had about committing this Large Adult Act of buying a house, when we already have a perfectly good place to live, still exist and have been magnified by the current crisis, I am split and the side portion of me is wildly grateful to wake up here. Which is how the pod people get you, I know.)
I don’t remember which of my parents taught us this tidy method of murder but it's exactly the kind of thing which, had we queried how THEY came by it, would have prompted the response “I learned it in the Orient”.
I have no idea where that phrase comes from either -- they were young enough that much of their lore and lingo came not from their lives as young adults (when they were already saddled with us) but from their own parents (two in the case of my mother, only one for my father whose own father had left when he was five or so — though there might have been remnants of his father that stayed with him and were stronger for the relative lack of his memories).
That phrase — “I learned it in the Orient” — sounds racist now (referencing some inherent wiliness, trickiness in the Asian character) but would have been unremarkable in the white suburbs of the 60s and early 70s. The Orient, as a fantasy, place, procedure has disappeared except for racist usage and embedded in scientific naming — for example the anomala orientalis or Oriental beetle, not nearly as beautiful in its casing as the popillia japonica or Japanese beetle.
5 july 2020
