Trolling around online a few weeks ago, I discovered a creature so terrifyingly awful that as a devotee of monster movies, Grimm fairy tales and Lovecraft, I couldn't believe it had escaped my attention for so long. Now that I've glimpsed a Rat King, though, visions of their twisted rodent forms have been in my head every day, gnawing at me.
Like zombies, vampires and werewolves, as an archetype, Rat Kings have their equivalents in everyday life. And I'm pretty certain I know a lair where a real-life Rat King lurks.
It's unclear how these creatures form, but the idea is that rats, living together in extreme proximity, crawling and wriggling over and under one another, find their long, rope-like tails entwined. Knotted. Permanently. And this clutch of limber, writhing bodies with pipe-gnashing teeth and pin-like claws becomes a single entity. A Rat King.
On Wikipedia I saw my first picture of a mummified Rat King, made up of 32 rats. The medieval mummy was on display in the Mauritanium scientific museum in Altenburg, Germany. The zoological museum at the University of Tartu in Estonia has more recent photos online showing thirteen rats entwined, their tails knotted like a dream-catcher built for nightmares.
In ancient times, the appearance of these creatures portended a plague. They appear in legends and folk tales, never as a good omen. Hoffman's mouse king in the Nutcracker Suite is thought to be inspired by the legend. Despite the overwhelming photographic evidence (why would an Estonian lie?), some have suggested Rat Kings are more fiction than fact, but I'm convinced they're real.
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Maybe the reason it's taken me so long to encounter a real-life Rat King is that I grew up in the wrong climate.
I spent my childhood in a place—unlike the Pioneer Valley—where people of different political parties and perspectives lived side by side. They lived in harmony most of the time, but come election season, they fought one another for political control with bare knuckles. The outcome of elections was often surprising, and sometimes politicians you'd grown familiar with, liked and thought could never lose were yanked mercilessly from office because more people liked what their opponent was saying.
Last I heard, things are still the same, and the pendulum continues to swing. The village follows one vision for a few terms, and then, when things get stale for the ruling party, the other one takes over. As a teen traveling in Europe, I'd been amazed at how much more vibrant and Technicolor their politics were than America's grayscale model, and I dreamed of one day seeing that kind of diversity and wealth of perspectives in U.S. discourse. I'd never imagined that as an adult I'd live under the Northampton system of one party rule, one perspective.
I fear that George W. Bush's utter fiasco of a presidency has dragged progressive America's attention away from their local politics for the last seven years, and it has dangerously lowered the threshold of what passes for transparent government and leadership with vision. People are so busy pointing fingers at the press for not seeing the truth behind "weapons of mass destruction" that they forget to look behind the buzzwords swarming at them in their own local papers.
In Northampton, so many residents are devoted to global issues and bringing about meaningful change elsewhere in the world that attention to what's happening here gets short shrift. Living in a city called "Paradise," we assume our Republican-free City Hall is going to do us right, and as long as they're using words like "eco-friendly," "smart growth," and "affordable housing," it's all got to be good. Occasionally, as with the Hilton Garden plans, the public raises a fuss, but their tempers don't seem to follow them into the ballot box.
By failing to scrutinize local politics like they do national politics for most of this decade, and by letting things stagnate, I fear Northampton voters have allowed a Rat King to grow in and around the shadows of City Hall.
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Not having had to stake a position in a debate against anyone fundamentally opposed to them, Northampton's newly elected officials arrive in City Hall without much of a platform and with a lot to learn. They might have issues they're particularly interested in and have some stated goals, but since no adversary is publicly pressing them for promises during the campaign and they didn't have to prepare for debate against anyone very different ideologically than themselves, they're as ignorant as most of us about how a city runs. Upon election, though, the questions from the public come fast.
Quick: How far away should a landfill be from an aquifer? How big does a development have to be to add to a town's tax base without overtaxing its resources? When can you tell a building's too far gone to be preserved or too valuable historically to be lost? What do these newbie politicians do—what do they say—when someone complains to them that they don't want their home demolished because of an exit ramp onto interstate 91?
In a one-party city, freshmen councilors learn from their peers at the City Council meetings, and without any members of another political party present, the arguments they hear are more process than policy, more minutiae than big picture. They pick up the lingo and they watch how the more experienced politicians work with the public and respond to questions. There might be other (more correct) definitions to the lingo they learn, and there might be better ways to communicate with the public, but without direct experience with other cities and towns, Northampton's newly elected officials stick with what they learned from their mentors. Without conflicting opinions to vary their educational mix, the understanding, perspectives and agendas of the freshman and senior officials meld, knot and twist. They become one big, nasty beast, empowered by the solidarity of their stunted vision.
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I'm certain that on their own the individual beings that make up a real Rat King would all be relatively benign, capable of possessing character and maybe even charm. But consider what it must be like to find oneself attached to a bigger, more powerful being, fighting not to be irrelevant. The bigger rats have a lot of the power, being able to exert dominance with sheer bulk, but the smaller rats must always be contemplating how to seize the moment, maneuver and affect the trajectory of the mass to benefit their own interests–at least for a while. Then, after having your nose dragged along the sewer beneath a pile of slimy rat bodies a few too many times, it might just become easier to give up dreams of being a leader, follow the horde and avoid trouble.
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What's so bad about a political Rat King, and how does it manifest itself?
Last week's news that a $1.3 million shortfall might force the closure of the Bridge Street Elementary School had Mayor Clare Higgins on the radio announcing: "Recession." The writing had been on the wall, the mayor said, things had been trending that way for a while, and now, with this recession, things looked particularly bleak for Northampton schools. For an hour she was interviewed on WHMP and insisted people needed to understand the systems and regulations better. Presumably, she hoped that if we understood them as well as she did, we'd also see there were no solutions. In an hour's time, all she offered were excuses.
Instead of offering leadership or accepting responsibility, she pointed to a problem everyone has seen looming for seven years as one she and those connected to her were somehow powerless to anticipate. Instead of having light shed on its behavior up to this point, the Rat King looks for the shadow of the federal government. Eclipsed by George Bush's shortcomings, maybe no one will ask why, if the Rat King knew for so long that this crisis was coming:
-Did they sell choice downtown real estate to Hilton hotel developers for a dollar?
-Did they waste the public's time last year thinking about a new, equally unfunded but much less needed upgrade to Pulaski Park?
-Didn't they build the new senior center a little smaller, or reuse an existing structure to house it, to save some money for schools?
-Did they get the state to fast-track $5.5 million for demolition of Old Main, but not urgently chase $1.3 million our schools now need 18 months later?
Political Rat Kings don't have a leader. They're more of a force than a sentient creature. Our local one is a mass joined together by uncritical faith that just because Northampton doesn't have politicians of different political parties battling in office, it's all going to work out. Our united faith in progressive values and the political process will see us through, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
One-party rule offers the seductive promise of frictionless progress and change, but in the decade I've lived here, I've never heard a plan for Northampton's future that's been based on accurate information and consistently adhered to for long. Instead of setting clear goals, achieving milestones and preparing for a future, history happens to Northampton, and the Rat King moves from crisis to crisis with breaks in between to tell everyone everything's fine. There is an overabundance of information, but no analysis or solutions offered. Whatever the crisis—whether it's tearing down the Green Street neighborhood (full of truly affordable housing), building an ugly hotel in downtown, or turning the school my child was to attend into upscale condos, the Rat King's response is the same: It's not the group's fault; the process was followed correctly, sorry about the results; if you want to talk about it now that it's too late to do anything, we're all ears.
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It won't be easy to banish this creature from our midst, but banish it we must. Forming an ad hoc best practices advisory committee, as Northampton did recently in the hopes of taming the beast will, I believe, have the opposite effect. This approach offers a solution without identifying the problem. Since what constantly frustrates Northampton is the Rat King's inability to see beyond the connections that bind it and the maze of processes it follows, adding another committee to the mix simply gives the creature more room to grow and attract new members.
To get rid of it, I think we have one hope. Listening to the Rat King speak through its many different mouths, I think I've detected a chink in its armor. After her most recent election, the mayor repeated a mantra the councilors have been mumbling for some time. In order for things to work under the Rat King, we're told, Northampton needs to learn to "disagree without being disagreeable."
The Rat King has thrived in a town where political anger, fundamental disagreement and real scrutiny are things we only lavish on our national leaders. Being polite to the Rat King is like feeding a bear at Yellowstone: are you really surprised that it decimated your tent after you tossed it a sandwich this morning? We need to create an environment that's hostile to Rat Kings—one that demands leadership and solutions over groupthink and excuses. Short of bussing in legions of Republicans to live among us, the only solution I can see to Northampton's Rat King problem is deciding that the time for disagreeable disagreement in local politics is now.
