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Crowbar Is Our Friend | Aug 09 2000

The name CROWBAR comes from a decade-old play by my friend Mickle Maher. The play is actually called When Will the Rats Come to Chew Through Your Anus? but I’ve never heard anyone call it anything but Rats. Is this because of that Anus at the end? I think it’s because the title is too long to bother saying, particularly when one can say Rats and be done with it. More recently Mickle wrote a play entitled, if I remember correctly, An Apology for the Course and Outcome of Certain Events Delivered by Doctor John Faustus on This His Final Evening. (I stopped trying to remember that title halfway through and looked up the rest.) People call this play An Apology, which in my opinion is a better title. As is Rats. Perhaps I’m a prude, but I don’t like the full title of Rats; it’s trying too hard to be provocative. None of this has anything to do with what I’m trying to say.

The main character in Rats is a man named Willard who is evidently the same Willard featured in that 70’s made-for-TV movie, Ben. Does anyone remember this movie? I do, barely. It’s about a boy, Willard, and his super-smart pet rat Ben who in the end leads a rat revolt against Willard. Rats picks up the story years later. I loved it but can only remember isolated bits. It is my fate to only remember isolated bits of what I love. This then brings me to my point. Toward the beginning of Rats, Willard describes a horrific psychology experiment in which a crowbar is plunged through the brain of a human subject, causing the subject to believe, as Willard tells us, “Lies. Nothing but lies. Red is green. The moon is made of wood. Kennedy is cancer spelled backwards. The crowbar is our friend.” This is what inspired the name CROWBAR. By which I mean the thought that something is causing us to believe the most outrageous and dangerous lies, including the lie that this lie-inducing, brain-splitting something is our friend. There are other reasons I like the name CROWBAR, but this is where it comes from.