Since the dawn of time, man has turned to the Common North American Least Shrew as a solution to our thorniest postmodern analogies. The popular lexicon sags under the weight of so many allusions to the Cryptotis parva. How long can this continue? We all know that the diminutive Common North American Least Shrew is ugly and annoying, and yet its wily cunning and shrewd adaptability so perfectly evoke that ineffable something– which we all understand subliminally but find so hard to articulate– at the heart of 21st century American culture.
The postmodern shrew can’t be pinned down. Though the greatest minds of our millennium, drawing from the rich shrew-based traditions of the ancients, have tilled this fertile soil time and time again hoping to sprout some answer. The plight of the contemporary thinker is itself as elusive as the rodential homologies they’ve labored for so long to forge.
The least common Common North American Least Shrew is still more American than the least shrewd northernmost commoner. This irony is the reality the shrew presents – nay – creates for the postmodernist. Its metaphorical metaphysics catches the analogous pedestrian in their ungodly tracks. Faith means nothing to the shrew. The traditions of the ancients sputter as the engine of our collective memory grinds out a new Truth: all is the shrew. Which is to say, all is a collective imagination, ending with the individual and beginning with the beady-eyed beast.
The search for Truth in the formless entropy of the universe is core to the human experience. But at what point does the postmodern quest for meaning begin to undermine itself? Maybe the shrew is really just a shrew. Maybe satire is just satire.
But when it comes down to it, wouldn’t we all rather live in a world where the Common North American Shrew, one of our smallest and homeliest mammals, can carry within it the spirit of a nation?
Our vote: for it.
