As time goes by, Matt Taibbi becomes ever more conservative in perspective. Today, Matt could be found waxing sardonic about suburban Americans of recent generations’ dependency on government and officialdom, invertebrate tendencies, and general inability to cope.

The New York Times ran a guest editorial by Belle Boggs, a North Carolina author who had a bat fly in her house. It didn’t bite her, but she needed a sheriff’s deputy, a county health nurse, state animal control, the CDC, and an E.R. doctor to tell her what to do about that. Naturally, the episode led her to think of Donald Trump:

After our visit from the bat, our sheriff’s department, public health department and university hospital all functioned exactly as designed. The C.D.C., a huge federal agency that works to protect every one of us from infectious disease, food-borne illness and emerging threats like bird flu, pulled through. The C.D.C. is part of what Mr. Trump’s allies would call the administrative state and is in the cross hairs of Project 2025, which proposes breaking up the agency… I want to believe Kamala Harris is right when she says “we are not going back” to a time when every calamity leaves us on our own.

Leaving aside the problem of the ubiquitous personality who answers “Donald Trump” to every stain on the Rorschach test of life, the Boggs essay made me wonder about America’s prognosis. Early citizens packed kids in wagons and rode into forests teeming with human and animal predators. Now people reach middle age needing the federal government to tell them what to do if a bat flies past.

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All this brings to mind a long ago incident, shortly after Karen and I were married and had acquired our first house (built in 1712) in Newtown, Connecticut.

We were having over for a serious formal dinner my two close friends from college and their wives. Karen was preparing a large roast of New Zealand fallow deer. I had laid in an ample supply of Lynch Bages. Karen was happy to have a suitable occasion to use the wedding present Spode and Baccarat.

The table was set with candles and china and crystal. We men were wearing black tie, and the wives were all in evening gowns.

Our dining room featured a massive colonial fireplace that once had functioned for cooking dinner. It had been rumfordized in the early 19th century, but it had no damper. Just as our guests were arriving, right down the chimney came an uninvited guest: a bat.

He circled the dining room, flew off down the front hall and (conveniently for me) turned left into the library, to which I was able to shut the door.

Rather than call for the authorities, myself, I thought over the problem, and came up with a solution. I remembered that among the pistols stored away in a cupboard in the same room there was my wife’s High Standard Trophy target .22 pistol.

I also had on hand a supply of.22 birdshot cartridges. These contain a small load of teeny tiny No. 12 shot, a bit bigger than dust. Just the ticket for wingshooting bats! I thought.

The bat was circling the room anti-clockwise, viewed from above. To my left and right were bookcases, to my rear was the wall with windows. One wouldn’t want to shoot in any of those directions. However, when we acquired our house the inside plaster wall around the fireplace was in bad shape. So I had carefully removed the ancient ornate wooden mantelpiece, and I’d covered over the bad plaster with fresh new sheetrock.

My repair work was still in progress. The sheetrock was not even yet painted. Consequently, I thought it would make an easily repairable backdrop. So I loaded the pistol, took my stance, and prepared to take that bat incoming, silhouetted against the sheetrock wall.

He circled once. He circled twice. I took aim. Bang! One shot as he came straight toward me and he dropped like a stone. The sheetrock was unmarred. I’d managed to put the entire pattern into him.

I gathered up the bat, using a sheet of paper, placed him for now in the wastebasket, closed the door behind me, and returned to our guests who had not even noticed that one quiet gunshot.

So perish all our enemies!

Karen’s target pistol.

Not really a new species, this is merely a cane toad trying to eat a bat. He is destined to fail as the LA Times reports.