We learnt about the food chain in school, with the help of directional arrows and colorful diagrams. Maybe I drew a beard and glasses on the poor organisms languishing at the bottom of this chain. It was the sort of thing I did back then.
Later, at the same school, I read Hamlet's speech about the common man who eats the fish who ate the worm who ate a king, and realized that the food chain is more like an ouroboros (which I knew about from extra-curricular reading).
These days, I'm mostly concerned with a different kind of food chain: the food chain of business. A hierarchical measurement of employment status that runs from boardroom predators down to the prey in their cubicles. I see myself reflected in a computer screen and observe that life has drawn a beard and glasses on my anxious face.
And I can't even find consolation by eating the fish that ate the worm that ate the CEO because the founder of this company had himself cryogenically frozen.
Comments